My sources in Brussels tell me that the European Commission’s report on how well its tobacco laws are doing should drop early spring. Maybe even as soon as March. This will be the starting gun in a race to overhaul the bloc’s laws restricting safer nicotine products, so what’s to be expected?
Perhaps I should start with what we shouldn’t expect.
We won’t get a dispassionate overview of what’s actually happening in tobacco control in Europe. It was drawn up by a consortium led by the European Network on Smoking Prevention, which has consistently called for bans of various kinds; and included Michael Bloomberg’s Vital Strategies, which disburses money to anti-harm reduction charities across the world. The consortium got €3 million of taxpayer funds to conduct its “research”.
We won’t get any recognition of how safer nicotine users feel. The public consultation that was supposed to inform it was riddled with leading questions crying out for prohibitionist answers. It was so bad that MEPs complained and formal complaints were submitted to the EU’s dispute resolution body. Since then, things have only got worse, with random NGOs urging the Commission to ignore public consultations on nicotine issues altogether.
And we won’t get a comprehensive overview of the science on safer nicotine products. The Health Commissioner himself is on a mission to spread disinformation on relative risk, and the Commission has never done a scientific comparison of harms from smoking, vaping and nicotine pouches, despite the Parliament pressing them for one.
What will emerge from this “process” — run by NGOs that called for bans on pretty much everything before being paid millions of taxpayer euros to run this supposedly “independent study” — is a permission structure for the EU executive to do what it wants to do anyway: propose bans on safer nicotine products it doesn’t like.
I’m not saying all this because all hope is lost. I’m saying it because it’s important that those who support harm reduction have the tools to call out the inevitable nonsense quickly and authoritatively.
The study the Commission did do (on vaping only), which was published in 2021 by its own research committee (known as SCHEER), does give one an idea of how this evaluation report will once again misrepresent reality.
A critique of that study published in Harm Reduction Journal cites five major shortcomings, which merit looking at in some detail, as they presage the nonsense that is likely to come in the evaluation report.
No reporting on the benefits of switching
The Commission is desperately trying to avoid assessing how harmful vapes (and now pouches) are when compared to cigarettes. It wasn’t in the SCHEER report (by design) and I’m willing to bet it won’t be in the evaluation report either, despite the European Parliament having specifically asked for one.
That hasn’t stopped EU Health Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi saying that he (and by extension the Commission) thinks that vaping, smoking and pouches all have the same risk profile. So we can assume that the Commission is planning to ignore (at best) or simply lie about (as they have been doing recently) the fairly obvious reality that safer nicotine products are indeed safer than smoking.
For the record (and one does get tired of having to repeat this): no serious scientist has suggested that vaping or pouches are anywhere near as harmful as smoking and many government authorities (including in Europe) say the opposite; there have been zero reported deaths from legal nicotine vapes since they were launched 20 years ago (including from “popcorn lung”); and vaping is the most efficacious quit method available today according to the most rigorous analysis of the data available (the “Cochrane” analysis).
Misrepresenting the “gateway” theory
The Commission will justify wanting more bans with reference to young people, using the completely disproven “gateway hypothesis” as its justification: that is to say, vaping and/or pouches lead young people to smoke.
The reason that the Commission wants to put the emphasis on a disproven claim that vaping leads young people to smoke is simple: they want to ban flavours (and products more generally) that offend the sensibilities of the people in charge of drafting the new law.
This is fairly obviously wrong. Smoking rates among under-18s in Europe have continued to decline over time, even while vaping has increased in popularity. So the question must be asked: if vaping leads to smoking, then where are all the smokers?
In fact, in the places that bother to measure it, nicotine use itself is on the decline as vaping rates increase and smoking rates plummet faster than ever before.
Daily smoking in France (18–75, mainland) fell from 25.3% in 2021 to 18.2% in 2024 according to data from Santé Publique France. That’s a 7.1 percentage point drop. Daily vaping in that same group sits at 6.5% in 2024, and it’s not significantly different from 2023. Remember, if you’re 18, you were born about two years after vapes hit the European market. (Man, I feel old.)
France reports tobacco sales down 24% from 2021–2024, while pharmacy sales of cessation aids are up 29% over the same period. And just 2.8% of French vapers never smoked.
Government data from the US show that over there, total nicotine use has crashed since vaping hit the market, down from 17% in 2012 to just 9.7% in 2024. A huge spike in high school vaping just before the pandemic has crashed, with no consequent increase in smoking rates in the same population.
So again, if vaping leads to smoking, then where are all the smokers?
Cardiac risk assessments that are just plain wrong
The Commission’s health policy often seeks high-visibility initiatives in areas where it has limited direct competence.
The pattern goes something like this: “Pick a major disease category whose development is partly predicated on lifestyle factors, hold a press conference, announce a multi-year strategy, implement a few lifestyle measures, hold another press conference, declare progress, pick a new disease category, repeat.”
These strategies make sure that those in the Commission who want vape bans or alcohol labelling or sugary drinks taxes have a bully pulpit from which to operate. The last five-year cycle was cancer, and this time around it’s heart disease. So expect a rehash of cardiac risk assessments from SCHEER that were plain wrong back then, along with some new ones that are equally wrong.
We’re already seeing them. The most recent study the Commission used to justify itself was almost immediately shot down by longtime tobacco control academic Professor Peter Hajek.
“The article and the press release give the impression that vaping or pouches pose the same risks to the heart and blood vessels as smoking. This is not true,” Hajek said. “Without everything else you get from burning tobacco, nicotine poses only a small fraction of the risks of smoking to the heart and blood vessels. Switching from smoking to ‘snus’, Swedish oral tobacco that delivers more nicotine than cigarettes, practically eliminates smoking-related risks of heart attacks and atherosclerosis.”
Astonishingly, the main source used by the authors of the paper to substantiate their call for widespread bans on safer nicotine products actually concludes the opposite.
“The section titled ‘Nicotine as a cardiovascular toxin regardless of delivery method’ even gives as its main source a high-quality scientific review of cardiovascular effects of nicotine that came to the opposite conclusion: that ‘risks of nicotine without tobacco combustion products are low compared to cigarette smoking’ and that ‘electronic cigarettes appear to pose low cardiovascular risk,’” Hajek explained.
Did the Commission retract its misstatements? Bother to try and explain itself? Demonstrate remorse? Nope. So we can expect the same nonsense to reappear in this report.
So what’s to be done here?
This is not a report that will be subject to some kind of formal feedback mechanism. The Commission will give its NGO cronies a couple of days’ notice, so they can get their press statements and media outreach in order. They’ll give the press an embargoed copy (unless we get it first, of course, then we’ll publish it), and the names of its NGO cronies for comment.
The same courtesy will not, of course, be afforded to the people who actually matter here: you know, the ones who use safer nicotine products. The result is likely to be a media feeding frenzy that follows the Commission’s line.
They’ll no doubt win this media cycle. But the real battle of actually getting these bans through Parliament is yet to come. I spoke at length about that here, and at this point writing to MEPs — perhaps pointing out some of the arguments made here — is probably the most effective single action a consumer can take. A bit of venting on social media is also probably good for the soul.
And all this is good practice for the real battles to come in the next couple of years.
