A leading Member of the German Bundestag on tobacco tax issues has called for Germany to legalise and tax nicotine pouches in an interview with Politico Germany.
Carsten Brodesser, who is a member of the Governing CDU party and the rapporteur on upcoming changes to Germany’s tobacco and nicotine tax regime, said that legalising pouches could mean new revenue for the cash-strapped German Finance ministry as it seeks to finance massive increases in defence expenditure.
Brodesser wants the German government to move ahead of any decision by the EU on its Tobacco Excise Directive, as Germany’s budget must be finalised by mid November.
Germany has a regulatory system for nicotine pouches that is unique in the EU. Food safety and consumer protection authorities there categorize tobacco-free nicotine pouches as oral consumption items akin to food. Because nicotine is not legally approved as a food ingredient or additive, adding it to a consumable product placed in the mouth violates food safety laws.
“With 17 million smokers in Germany and around 130,000 smoking-related deaths every year, maintaining a system that blocks legal access to one of the least harmful alternatives to cigarettes makes little public-health sense” said Delon Human, leader of Smoke Free Sweden.
“Sweden has shown what can happen when smokers are given access to alternatives they are willing to use. Since nicotine pouches were introduced, Sweden’s rapid decline in smoking rates has accelerated, particularly among women. Germany now has an opportunity to learn from that experience by bringing pouches into a properly regulated legal market and giving smokers another credible route away from cigarettes.”
“Legalisation would also allow Germany to replace an expanding illicit market with proper consumer protections. An estimated 1.4 million Germans already use nicotine pouches. Regulating their sale would enable strict age controls, product standards and ingredient transparency, while ensuring adult smokers can obtain safer alternatives from legitimate sources rather than the black market.”
Tobacco control groups, such as Erin Roman from the EU’s Smoke Free Partnership, argued that the move was trading “public health for revenue” and that pouches should remain banned in the EU’s largest country. Nicotine pouches do not contain or produce smoke.
Clive Bates, a harm reduction activist and former CEO of UK tobacco control group Action on Smoking and Health, claimed this was “negligent”.
“A few dozen comfortable middle-class activists want to influence legislation that denies about 20 million people in Germany and about 94 million people in the EU lawful access to the safest forms of nicotine”, he wrote on his Substack. “They know, or should know, that doing this would have inevitable harmful unintended consequences such as the formation of black markets and more smoking”.
