Europe’s Choice: Fight Smoking or Fight Nicotine?
08th Oct 2026
There are two schools of thought in today’s tobacco and nicotine policy debate. One wants to reduce smoking. The other wants to reduce nicotine use. As long as policymakers continue to pretend these are the same thing, Europe will continue to fail.
Because if the goal really is to eliminate cigarettes, policymakers should start by looking at the countries that are actually succeeding.
Sweden today has the lowest smoking rate in Europe. According to the latest statistics from the Swedish Public Health Agency, just 5.4% of Swedes report smoking daily. This low rate is largely attributable to the widespread use of traditional tobacco snus and nicotine pouches. Smoking-related mortality is also at a record low.
In the UK, 10.6% of adults smoked in 2024 – the lowest level since records began. At the same time, more adults now use e-cigarettes than smoke cigarettes.
In New Zealand, daily smoking has fallen from 16.4% in 2011/12 to 6.8% in 2024/25.
What these countries have in common is not tougher campaigns, more press releases or greater ambition. What they share, to varying degrees, is an acceptance of harm reduction. They have been willing to recognise that using nicotine is not necessarily the same thing as smoking.
Meanwhile, the EU average remains at around 24% of the population, with smoking rates above 30% in both Greece and France, while in Bulgaria almost four in ten people still smoke.
Despite years of grand declarations about creating a “tobacco-free generation”, millions of Europeans continue to smoke.
Against this backdrop, eight European governments – including the Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, France and Spain – are now calling for the EU’s next tobacco directive to move in the opposite direction. In a joint letter to the European Commission, they propose, among other things, measures to stop new nicotine products, impose stricter flavour restrictions and lower nicotine limits, while giving Member States greater scope to ban nicotine pouches. The question is why Europe would want to make alternatives less accessible when countries that have embraced them have succeeded in reducing smoking – while many of the countries calling for tougher restrictions still have smoking rates several times higher than Sweden’s.
That should prompt a simple question: What problem are we actually trying to solve?
If the objective is to reduce cancer, cardiovascular disease and smoking-related deaths, the results seen in Sweden, New Zealand and the UK are difficult to dismiss or ignore.
If, on the other hand, the objective is to eliminate all nicotine use, the picture looks very different. Nicotine pouches, snus and vaping then become problems in themselves – even when cigarette smoking falls to record-low levels.
This is where the European debate has become stuck.
Too many public-health actors appear to believe that success should be measured by how many products are banned rather than by how many cigarettes disappear.
But people do not die from statistics. They die from smoking. Europe therefore faces a choice:
Either it continues pursuing symbolic policies that treat all nicotine products as if they were the same. Or it starts learning from the countries that have actually succeeded in getting people to stop smoking – and, in doing so, have reduced both the harm and deaths caused by smoking.
After two decades of missed EU targets, persistently high smoking rates and an ever-growing list of restrictions, the answer should be obvious. The only question is whether Europe’s policymakers are prepared to change course?
