A tiny archipelago with a population of just 18,000, has asked the UN to put nicotine on the same list as crystal meth, ecstasy and the date-rape drug GHB in an audacious move co-ordinated by European tobacco control bigwigs.
Palau – a country with a GDP similar to the cost of a single Boeing 787 airliner – has prepared a detailed dossier and a slick website explaining why it thinks the war on drugs should be extended to smokers. But it hasn’t acted alone, and the country’s co-conspirators will be hugely influential when the EU revises its tobacco laws next year.
Its application has been put together by Charis Girvalaki and Thomas Munzel, two names that are very familiar in the corridors of power in Brussels and paid up members of Europe’s tobacco control establishment lobbying to ban safer products across Europe.
Girvalaki is the Scientific Director for the European Network on Smoking Prevention, the main non-governmental organisation advising the European Commission on its revision to the Tobacco Products Directive.
The EU Ombudsman criticised the advisory appointment of ENSP, noting that there were “legitimate concerns as to the partiality and capacity of the NGO to deliver a fair and unbiased assessment”. That conclusion seems relevant here.
Munzel, meanwhile, wrote a paper in support of the EU tightening its laws on safer nicotine products in December 2025 that was roundly criticised by longtime tobacco control experts including Peter Hajek, a researcher considered a leader in the tobacco control field.
“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 at the time, also noting that the paper “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’.
Other authors include Coral Gartner, the academic architect and chief defender of Australia’s failed prescription-only vape model. Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) shows that cigarette consumption – legal and illegal combined – is up 8% since 2016, as Gartner’s policy took hold. Illicit products are now around 80% of all nicotine and tobacco consumed in Australia, up from 12% eight years ago, leading to so-called “tobacco wars” between criminal gangs across the country.
Clearing the Air interviewed Fiona Patten and Hayley van Loon on the topic, and both were unsparing in their criticism of the criminal consequences of Australia’s policy.
This is the policy world Palau’s authors want to globalise. Gartner designed it, Australia ran it, Girvalaki and Munzel salivate enviously at it, and the result is more smoking and more crime.
Former Australian Federal Police detective Rohan Pike told Sky News Australia that “Australia has gone from ‘world leading’ to the global laughing stock of tobacco control”.
“We must remember who caused this total failure of policy. It is the same public health advocates that the government goes to to seek the solution. It’s like asking the arsonist how to put out the fire. They need to apologise and move aside so we can blow up our policy and start again.”
If Palau wins, vapes become a pharmaceutical product or contraband: probably the latter. Pouches stop being sold in the corner shop and start being sold in the back of someone’s car. Pharmacists and big pharma, who already supply patches and gums, keep their monopoly and extend it.
And it will be because of a Pacific island with the GDP of a passenger jet, an NGO the European Ombudsman has already criticised for partiality, an Australian academic whose policies have led to more smoking and out of control gang warfare, and a German cardiologist whose own central source contradicts his conclusions on EU policy.
Tobacco kills 26 people a year in Palau but its obesity rate is the third highest in the world. The country has chosen to take nicotine to the UN, not diet.
The UN vote on whether or not to actually take this madness up is scheduled for March 2028.
