Think of a Swedish entrepreneur going into a regulator’s office ten years ago with a rather unusual idea. Namely, a small white pouch that contains nicotine but no tobacco, no smoke, and no smell. In Stockholm he eventually obtained age restrictions, rules regarding labelling and access to the market. But in the Brussels setup that eight health ministers currently have in mind, he would receive a letter stating that new products are no longer being accepted.
This is not a caricature. On 6 October the health ministers of the Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, France, Hungary, Latvia, Slovenia and Spain requested the Commission to include a “market freeze” in the revised Tobacco Products Directive, so that no new product containing nicotine, or anything with nicotine-like properties, or anything that merely resembles them, could ever reenter the EU market. Although it is a small file, small files are where major strategies are tried out. And this one poses an uncomfortable question: did anyone in the EU actually read the Draghi report?
The Doctor’s Diagnosis
Two years ago, Mario Draghi examined the patient and did not mince words. In The Future of European Competitiveness, he found that EU companies spend roughly half as much on research and innovation, as a share of GDP, as their American peers. Europe, he warned, is stuck in a “middle technology trap”: investing in what already exists while new technologies are born, financed and scaled elsewhere.
And the cause? Draghi pointed squarely at regulation. Over three US congressional terms (2019–2024), Washington passed about 3,500 federal laws; the EU adopted some 13,000 acts. Many follow a precautionary logic, dictating business conduct in advance to avert risks that may never materialize. The burden falls on small firms and newcomers, the very people who bring new products to market. Capitals applauded, and Brussels discovered a sudden passion for the word “simplification.” So far, so good.
When the Cure Is the Disease
Let us now return to the prescription from the eight capitals. Most precautionary rules at least delay taking action until a product has appeared. The freeze, on the other hand, dispenses with that formality. It is a precautionary principle so pure that it does not even need a product: there is no evidence to consider, no cost-benefit analysis to carry out, and the only thing to suspect is the fact that it is new.
The letter is refreshingly open in admitting how it reasons. Its ban on flavourings, limits on nicotine, and requirement for standardised designs would be applied equally across all categories, specifically in order to prevent consumers from “substituting” one product for another. But what exactly is substitution if not the instance when a smoker replaces the most harmful product on the market with a much safer one? A rule designed to stop that kind of change only protects one existing company: cigarettes.
The signal won’t remain within the nicotine’s sphere either. Investors in batteries, biotechnology or AI won’t see the freeze as a story about nicotine; they will see it as an indication of how Europe receives new developments.
A Second Opinion from Stockholm
Sure there is an alternative; Europe has no need to guess since Sweden has already carried out the experiment. The country used the same measures as its neighbours (high cigarette taxes, bans on smoking, and health warnings) yet it also allowed smokers to switch to lower-risk alternatives: first to snus and then, from 2016, to nicotine pouches. In 2022, rather than banning the pouches, Sweden introduced age restrictions, nicotine limits, and labeling.
The results are hard to argue with. Smoking fell from 11.4% in 2012 to 3.7% in 2026, the fastest decline in the EU. Sweden records 36% fewer lung cancer deaths than the EU average. Pouches, a “new nicotine product” if ever there was one, reached smokers that snus never did: among women, smoking fell from 11.2% in 2015 to 5.7%.
Read the Report, Then Write the Rule
None of this requires Brussels to abandon its public health goals. It requires applying the method Draghi recommended: quantify a rule’s cost before adopting it, regulate products by relative risk, and protect minors through age verification and enforcement instead of category bans. The Commission’s own Better Regulation toolbox already demands this.
The Commission will shortly determine the contents of its proposal. In the event that the freeze succeeds in having it included, the Draghi report will become part of a long-standing European tradition—that is, a strategy which everyone praises but no one puts into practice. But if evidence and proportionality are the deciding factors, Europe will have demonstrated that its new enthusiasm for competitiveness endures even when it comes into contact with a stigmatized industry.
There is a term in medicine for treatments which cause the diseases that they claim to cure: iatrogenic. The innovation economy in Europe cannot afford another such example.
