Sweden has driven smoking below five per cent. That is the target the European Union set for itself and is on track to miss. But one country in Europe has solved the problem the Commission has spent two decades legislating against, and it did so with products the Commission is currently working to restrict.
You would expect Brussels to be interested in this development. Instead, it spent this summer running a consultation designed to make the Swedish solution persona non grata.
The questionnaire asked Europeans what should happen next to nicotine regulation. Respondents could ask for more regulation, a broader scope, or stricter restrictions. There was no option to say that the existing rules had failed, that they were counterproductive, or that different products carrying different risks might deserve different treatment. The consultation permitted only one regulatory direction, and the revision of the Tobacco Products Directive, expected before the end of the year, will be presented as its result.
It is not entitled to design a consultation that prevents anyone from raising it
This is not what a consultation is and not what it should strive to be. Citizens, NGOs, academia and industry should submit evidence. A neutral institution weighs it and proposes accordingly. Here, however, the conclusion was fixed, and the question was reverse-engineered to fit, making the exercise a simple formality rather than an actual deliberative process to represent citizens.
None of this is difficult to explain once you hear from the responsible Commissioner on this file. Olivér Várhelyi told Euractiv he is one hundred per cent convinced that vaping, pouches and heated tobacco are as harmful as cigarettes. He has attributed popcorn lung to vaping, a condition with no recorded cases linked to e-cigarettes and caused by a chemical already banned in legal EU vapes. This is a pattern rather than a slip-up, repeated in committees, on X and in formal answers to Parliament. Twenty-three of Europe's most senior researchers in tobacco and nicotine science wrote to Ursula von der Leyen to call the Commission's position “damaging misinformation and scientifically untenable”. In this letter, professors of medicine, epidemiology and toxicology, describe their own field being completely ignored by the EU Commission in these processes.
The public has had no better reception. The call for evidence preceding the consultation drew more than 80,000 submissions. The Commission followed it with a questionnaire that had no space or regard for what many of them had said. When Europeans responded to the Commission's tobacco tax consultation in large numbers, overwhelmingly against, a Commission official said at a Brussels event that some contributions had probably been submitted in a coordinated manner and were not necessarily representative of individual opinions. People who quit smoking by switching, and said so, were reclassified as a suspected influence operation.
Sweden's numbers were produced by exactly these people, in large numbers, over years
There is a reason the Commission would rather not hear from them. Twenty-four per cent of adults in the EU still smoke, and every one of them is proof that the current approach is not working. They are also the only constituency with direct experience of whether the alternatives do. Sweden's numbers were produced by exactly these people, in large numbers, over years, doing the thing Brussels is now trying to make harder.
The Commission is entitled to disagree with the Swedish evidence and example. It is not entitled to design a consultation that prevents anyone from raising it, and then cite the outcome as public support. When the TPD proposal arrives, Parliament and Council will be asked to treat it as the product of a consultative process. They should read the questionnaire and the 80,000 submissions before they accept that claim. Everything needed to test it is already on the record. Europe has a working example of how to reach its own target. It sits in the north of the continent, and it is being ignored by an institution that prefers its own ideological doctrine to results.
Brought to you by Consumer Choice Center
Michael Landl is the director of the World Vapers’ Alliance. He is an experienced policy professional and a passionate vaper. He studied at the University of St. Gallen and worked for several public policy outlets and the German Parliament.
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