Consultation Response — Proposed Update to EU Tobacco Control Rules

Date: 15 June 2026

I write to express my serious concerns regarding the proposed update to the EU tobacco control framework. The measures under consultation fail on four distinct grounds: scientific accuracy, criminogenic consequences, harm to innovation, and subordination of evidence to ideology. Each is addressed in turn below.

I.  The Proposed Measures Are Not Aligned with the Stated Public Health Objective

The stated objective of the regulatory update is to strengthen public health protection — specifically, to reduce cancer incidence. The preponderance of available scientific evidence does not support the proposition that all tobacco products, irrespective of their delivery mechanism, share equivalent carcinogenic profiles.

The bulk of current evidence — surveyed comprehensively in:

Tobacco Regulation, Economics, and Public Health (3 vols.), Samuel C. Hampsher-Monk, James E. Prieger& Sudhanshu Patwardhan, Palgrave-Macmillan, London, 2024

— indicates that products such as e-cigarettes, vaping devices, heat-not-burn devices, and oral tobacco do not carry the carcinogenic risks associated with combusted tobacco. The critical distinction is not tobacco per se, but the combustion of organic matter — tobacco or otherwise — and the resulting inhalation of combustion by-products. This distinction is well-established in the toxicological literature.

Restricting access to non-combusted tobacco products on the basis that they share the same risk profile as cigarettes is therefore scientifically indefensible and will not advance the objective of reducing cancer incidence. The relevant provisions should accordingly be withdrawn.

Where uncertainty remains — for example regarding the long-term effects of products that have only recently entered the market — the appropriate response is transparency, not mischaracterisation. If the precautionary principle is being invoked, it should be stated explicitly and applied honestly. It is not acceptable for a public health agency to advance restrictions grounded in a conflation of cause (combustion) and carrier (tobacco). This is precisely the kind of distortion that erodes public trust in health authorities, scientific institutions, and, by extension, in the European governance structures that this consultation is part of. Those who seek to dismantle EU-level regulatory frameworks will find their arguments strengthened, not weakened, by proposals of this kind.

The proposal also risks exacerbating health inequalities. Cigarette consumption rates differ sharply across income groups in the EU. Non-combusted tobacco alternatives have demonstrated value as cessation aids. Raising the price and restricting the availability of these alternatives penalises lower-income smokers disproportionately — an outcome that sits in direct contradiction with the social justice objectives to which the Commission has publicly committed.

II.  Criminogenic Consequences

The implementation of WHO-endorsed tobacco controls has, in numerous jurisdictions including EU Member States, been accompanied by the growth of illicit tobacco markets. A substantial and growing share of consumption is now supplied through unregulated channels: products subject to neither quality controls nor safety standards, frequently manufactured by unlicensed producers and distributed through criminal networks.

The public health consequences of this shift are material. Unregulated devices carry substantially higher risks of hardware failure and chemical contamination — for instance, from metal leaching from heating coils into vaping liquids. The harms associated with illicit supply chains may, in practice, exceed those the regulation seeks to avoid.

Beyond the immediate product-safety dimension, the history of prohibition of habit-forming substances — alcohol prohibition in the United States, and the decades-long global prohibition on cannabis and cocaine — provides a consistent lesson: over-restriction does not eliminate demand, it transfers it to criminal supply chains. Those chains, once established, develop their own institutional momentum, expand their market footprints (frequently targeting vulnerable populations), and generate violent competition. Law enforcement escalation tends to harden rather than dissolve these networks.

Demand for habit-forming substances exhibits well-documented price inelasticity. Consumers who cannot readily substitute will economise elsewhere — on food, on housing costs — or will turn to unlawful means of acquiring income. The cumulative effect of measures that restrict access and raise prices on inelastic-demand goods is a predictable cycle: restriction generates transgression, transgression invites intensified restriction, and the cycle produces elevated levels of property crime — shoplifting, theft, burglary — that constitute the most widespread and directly experienced blight on everyday public life. It is difficult to understand how a responsible public authority could, in light of this evidence, proceed with the measures proposed.

III.  Anti-Innovation and Regulatory Overreach

The Draghi Report on European Competitiveness identified the EU’s regulatory burden — at approximately 2.4 times the volume of US regulation — as a structural impediment to growth, innovation, and the retention of talent. The report called explicitly for a regulatory pause. The present proposal moves in the opposite direction.

Rather than nurturing emerging European industries in the reduced-harm nicotine and tobacco sector — of which Swedish oral tobacco and nicotine product manufacturers represent an internationally competitive example — the proposed measures threaten to curtail them. These are precisely the kinds of innovative, science-driven sectors that the EU’s industrial strategy should be seeking to develop.

To strangle emerging industries on the basis of precautionary reasoning that does not withstand scientific scrutiny, while simultaneously increasing compliance burdens on established operators, is to compound a structural problem that the Commission’s own analytical work has identified as an existential challenge for European economic relevance.

IV.  The Subordination of Science to Ideology

The Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan is, in its intentions and in many of its measures, a worthwhile initiative. However, in its treatment of tobacco, it has allowed an ideological commitment — the aspiration to create a ‘tobacco-free generation’ — to override a rigorous assessment of the available evidence.

The aetiology of tobacco-related cancers is rooted in the inhalation of combustion by-products, not in tobacco as a substance. There is no credible scientific basis on which to prohibit or severely restrict the use of oral tobacco, heated tobacco products, or e-cigarettes by reference to their association with smoking-related cancer — unless those products demonstrably share the same causal mechanism, which the evidence indicates they do not.

To persist with a plan that conflates cause and carrier, will achieve little of its stated objectives at considerable social and economic cost, and reflects an adherence to a dated ideological framework rather than a current reading of the scientific literature, is to bring into disrepute every institution associated with it. The Commission should revisit the evidential basis for those provisions of the proposal that treat non-combusted products as equivalent in risk to cigarettes, and should revise them accordingly.

Summary of Recommendations

1 Withdraw provisions that restrict access to non-combusted tobacco products without a distinct, product-specific evidential basis demonstrating carcinogenic equivalence with cigarettes.

2 Where the precautionary principle is invoked, state this explicitly and separately from causal claims regarding tobacco and cancer.

3 Commission an independent review of the evidence base for the tobacco provisions of the Beating Cancer Plan, with particular attention to the distinction between combusted and non-combusted products.

4 Conduct a formal assessment of the criminogenic effects of proposed restrictions, drawing on comparative evidence from prohibition and drug control policy.

5 Align the proposal with the EU’s stated competitiveness and innovation objectives by exempting demonstrably lower-harm products from the most restrictive regulatory provisions.