EU Should Reject WHO Pressure on Nicotine Pouches and Follow Sweden’s Anti-Smoking Success
Brussels, 15 May 2026 –The World Health Organization today urged European countries not to follow Sweden’s regulatory approach to nicotine pouches, claiming the products are designed to hook young people. The Consumer Choice Center is calling the WHO’s intervention misplaced and counter‑productive for consumers at a time when Sweden’s experience shows how safer nicotine alternatives can rapidly cut smoking.
“Sweden shows what happens when regulators treat adult smokers like adults,” said Zoltán Kész, Government Affairs Manager at the Consumer Choice Center. “Daily smoking has fallen to among the lowest levels in Europe because people who could not or would not quit overnight were given access to nicotine pouches and other lower‑risk products instead of being pushed back to cigarettes. Telling other EU countries to ignore that success will not protect public health. It will protect the cigarette market.”
For decades, Sweden has been an outlier in Europe’s nicotine landscape, allowing the sale of snus and, more recently, modern oral nicotine pouches that contain no tobacco leaf. As these products became more widely available, Sweden’s adult daily smoking rate dropped to around or even below the 5 percent “smoke‑free” benchmark, far ahead of the EU’s 2040 target. Nonetheless, the WHO continues to push a restrictive, one‑size‑fits‑all approach to all nicotine products, calling for tighter rules that risk eliminating the very alternatives that helped drive down cigarette use.
“European policymakers are in the middle of revising tobacco and nicotine laws, and they face a simple question,” Kész added. “Do they copy‑paste a prohibition‑minded template, or do they look at the EU’s own success story and design rules that reflect risk differences between cigarettes and smoke‑free products? If they choose the former, the losers will be the millions of smokers across the continent who never get a realistic chance to switch.”
The Consumer Choice Center is urging EU institutions and national regulators to base nicotine policy on comparative risk and real‑world evidence. That means keeping smoke‑free products like pouches and vapes available to adult smokers while enforcing strict age limits and marketing rules, rather than banning or over‑taxing safer options and leaving cigarettes as the default.
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For media enquiries please contact:
Zoltan Kesz
Zoltan@consumerchoicecenter.
The Consumer Choice Center is an independent, nonpartisan consumer advocacy group championing the benefits of freedom of choice, innovation, and abundance in everyday life for consumers in over 100 countries. We closely monitor regulatory trends in Washington, Brussels, Ottawa, Brasilia, London, and Geneva. Find out more at www.consumerchoicecenter.org
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