Across the continent, the European Union is shifting from a science-based approach to tobacco control toward outright prohibition. Instead of encouraging safer alternatives that could save millions of lives, policymakers are reaching for bans, excessive taxes, and product restrictions.
Flavour prohibitions, arbitrary nicotine caps, and even outright bans on pouches or vaping products are advancing in several member states. This is not evidence-based health policy — it is a retreat into moralistic regulation that ignores the most important fact in tobacco control: prohibition doesn’t work.
Europe’s own experience proves it. Whenever safer nicotine products are made unavailable or unaffordable, demand does not vanish. It simply moves to the black market or back to cigarettes — the single most harmful form of nicotine use. The result is more smoking, more preventable illness, and more economic and social costs. Bans may look decisive on paper, but they fail in practice.
Germany’s approach to nicotine pouches is a prime example of this failure. Because they are treated as a food product, pouches are currently illegal to sell in Germany — despite being smoke-free, tobacco-free, and recognized internationally as a far less harmful option for smokers.
There is no plan to change this, even as over 30% of Germans still smoke. This sends a perverse message: the most dangerous nicotine delivery system (the cigarette) is legal and taxed, while the safer alternative is banned outright.
Bans mirror past mistakes
The consequences are predictable: unregulated products of uncertain origin are sold online and in back alleys, quality control disappears, and criminal networks step in to profit. Tax revenue is lost, law enforcement is forced to police a needless black market, and age verification is non-existent. Far from protecting public health, Germany’s de facto prohibition makes smokers less safe and leaves them with fewer off-ramps.
This pattern is repeating elsewhere in Europe. Several countries are pressing ahead with sweeping flavour bans that will remove most reduced-risk products from the legal market. Others are proposing steep excise taxes that will price safer alternatives out of reach, while cigarettes remain cheap by comparison. Such measures are not just anti-market — they are anti-science. They ignore decades of evidence showing that the harm from tobacco comes from combustion, not nicotine itself. They ignore the success of countries that have embraced harm reduction.
The clearest success story is Sweden, which has achieved the lowest smoking rate and lowest tobacco-related mortality in the EU, largely thanks to the availability of oral nicotine products. Swedish men, in particular, have avoided the epidemic of lung cancer seen elsewhere in Europe by switching to smoke-free alternatives. Rather than replicate that success, many governments seem intent on closing the very door Sweden left open.
This prohibitionist reflex comes at a cost Europe cannot afford. We have already seen in other jurisdictions what happens when prohibition takes hold. In Australia, a harsh prescription-only model for vaping has driven a booming black market, leading to hundreds of violent incidents — including more than 250 firebombings — linked to illicit sales. Europe risks importing the same problem if it follows this path.
The solution is not complicated: regulate, don’t ban. Set product standards, require ingredient disclosure, impose strict age limits, and tax proportionately to risk. These measures protect consumers, give smokers a viable way out of cigarettes, and ensure the market remains transparent and accountable.
For the European Parliament and Commission, this is a crucial moment. Europe can choose evidence over ideology and build a framework that encourages smokers to switch to far less harmful alternatives — or it can double down on prohibition and watch as smoking rates stall, illicit markets grow, and preventable deaths continue.
The EU has an opportunity to lead on harm reduction, just as it has led on other areas of public health. Doing so requires the courage to say what the evidence already shows: prohibition does not work. Pragmatic regulation does.
