The European Commission has just published its evaluation of the Tobacco Products Directive — the legal document that will shape tobacco and nicotine policy across the EU for the next decade. It is supposed to be an honest assessment of what has worked, what has not, and what needs to change. The headline finding: smoking across the EU has fallen by 14% since 2012. Brussels is celebrating this as a major achievement, writes Michael Landl, director at World Vapers Alliance (pictured, below).
While the Commission was busy congratulating itself, Sweden was doing something entirely different. This week, Stockholm announced its smoking rate has fallen to 3.7%. That is a 66% decline over the same period. Sweden did not do it with bans or by treating its citizens like children incapable of making informed choices. It did it by letting smokers switch to less harmful alternatives such as nicotine pouches, snus, and vaping.
The Commission’s report mentions Sweden. But not to learn from it. Sweden appears only in the context of enforcement problems around snus in neighbouring countries where the product is banned, and smoking rates are higher. The most dramatic smoking decline in modern European history is reduced to a footnote about border control.
That tells you everything about what this document actually is. This is not a scientific review. It is a political verdict in search of supporting evidence, and when the evidence pointed the wrong way, it was reframed or left out.
The pattern repeats throughout. The report dismisses vaping as an ineffective quitting tool while ignoring the most rigorous independent reviews available, which consistently find that vaping outperforms traditional nicotine replacement for cessation. It acknowledges that nicotine pouches expose users to a fraction of the toxicants found in cigarettes, then immediately pivots to addiction risks to justify restricting them. The report also peddles the gateway myth (the claim that vaping leads adolescents to cigarettes) repeatedly and without qualification. In the same document, the Commission acknowledges that youth smoking has dropped to its lowest recorded level in the EU. The commission does not seem to notice the contradiction. If vaping were truly pulling a generation of adolescents toward cigarettes, youth smoking would not be declining. The evidence is right there in their own pages.
Every country that actually solved the problem is treated the same way. The UK slashed smoking rates by embedding vaping into its national health strategy. The Czech Republic and Greece made more progress in three years than most EU countries managed in a decade by embracing harm reduction. None of it features as a success worth replicating. It does not fit the conclusion the Commission had already reached.
What the Commission did find worth including was a way to dismiss the public. When thousands of ordinary European citizens responded to the consultations, the Commission categorised their views as the product of industry campaigns and commercial interests. Real people who switched from cigarettes to vapes and never looked back were filed under “not credible” and ignored.
The tragedy is not just the bad science. It is what comes next. This report will form the legal and political foundation for the revision of the Tobacco Products Directive. Flavour bans, tighter restrictions on vaping, and new barriers for nicotine pouches. All of it is built on a document that treated the most successful harm-reduction story in Europe as a smuggling problem.
Smokers looking for a way out deserve better. They deserve honest information about the relative risks of different products. They deserve access to the alternatives that helped millions of people in Sweden, the UK, and elsewhere quit smoking for good. Instead, Brussels is preparing to make those alternatives harder to access, more expensive, and less appealing.
The Commission had a choice. It could build the TPD revision on the evidence of what actually works: harm reduction, consumer access, and proportionate regulation. It chose not to. If the revision is built on this report, smoking will remain a permanent fixture of European life for another generation. Sweden proved there is a better way. The Commission just decided it was not worth mentioning.
