Brussels’ target to make Europe ‘smokefree’ by 2040 is faltering. High taxes, messy regulations, and a booming market for illegal cigarettes are undermining Europe’s anti-smoking efforts. Lately, though, the European Parliament has begun claiming smokefree successes and falling smoking rates. Has Brussels finally found a route to making its smokefree dream a reality?
For a population to be considered ‘smokefree,’ fewer than 5% of adults must be smokers. Achieving that by 2040 will require some huge drops in smoking rates. Around 1 in 4 European adults smoke. Smoking is above 20% in most European countries – sometimes almost double that. Getting adults to give up cigarettes in their tens of millions in such a short timeframe is an uphill struggle, so Brussels will need a strong strategy. Its current approach of raising excise taxes and regulating products to within an inch of their lives is backfiring – smokers simply switch to illicit cigarettes.
Why, then, did the European Parliament X account post an image comparing smoking rates across EU member states and boasting that “EU tobacco rules are helping to reduce smoking and prevent deaths”? Has Brussels discovered an alternative set of policies which might offer more success in bringing smoking rates down?
The European Parliament’s social media post highlights Sweden as the member state with the lowest smoking rate, at just 8%. (It also concedes in the post that new data suggests the Swedish smoking rate has dropped even further to 5%, making it the EU’s first smokefree country.) Sweden has left its European neighbours in the dust. Awkwardly for the EU, though, Sweden achieved its success by ignoring what Brussels was doing and pursuing a totally different approach.
The secret is this: the Swedish government did not get its smokers to quit en masse by forcing them away from cigarettes with aggressive tax hikes and smoking bans. In fact, many of Sweden’s smokers have not given up tobacco at all. Instead, they have switched from cigarettes to snus, a smokeless tobacco product. Sweden’s 1.1 million snus users simply place the product under their upper lip. No smoke required.
Switching from cigarettes to snus is near-miraculous for your health. Since snus doesn’t require burning tobacco, the switch brings a dramatic drop in the risk of cancer and heart attacks – so much so that the risk levels become similar to quitting tobacco altogether. Things are better still for the 1 in 20 Swedish adults who use nicotine pouches – tobacco-free pockets of nicotine which, like snus, sit under the user’s upper lip. Nicotine pouches have no well-documented direct health risks. Compared to smoking, the risk of cancer is extremely small, if it exists at all.
These innovative products are not just safer than smoking. They are extremely effective tools for helping smokers quit. Along with electronic cigarettes (also known as vapes), snus and nicotine pouches have doubtless already saved millions of lives because smokers use them to wean themselves off traditional cigarettes – and because many young people never start smoking in the first place, choosing these other products instead. (Young adults account for most growth in snus and pouch use.) In other words, assisting smokers in cheaply and easily accessing other nicotine products is essential in making a population smokefree.
The key to Sweden’s success is the government’s attitude in chasing its smokefree future. It did not view smokers as wrongdoers who need pushing away from a deadly vice. Instead, it saw them as users of a product who needed a helping hand to quit. Sweden offered smokers a path to becoming smokefree without punitive taxes, while still allowing them to get their nicotine fix through snus or pouches. It worked.
The EU and Swedish approaches to tackling smoking are polar opposites. While Sweden pursues free choice, civil liberties, and pragmatic methods to help smokers quit, Brussels is mulling higher minimum tax rates through the Tobacco Excise Directive (TED) and a host of harsh new regulations designed to squeeze nicotine products out of the legal market through the Tobacco Products Directive (TPD).
Bizarrely, these EU policies target the very tools Sweden used to achieve its smokefree success – snus, nicotine pouches, and vapes. Brussels frequently groups all tobacco and nicotine products together, even though the newer products carry little to no health risk. They are the solution to smoking, not part of the problem.
Still, the EU persists in cracking down on all nicotine products. Health Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi said recently that pouches and vapes “are causing the same amount of harm as traditional tobacco products.” This is completely false, but Brussels seems stuck in its purist anti-nicotine mindset. The result is too many Europeans keep smoking, leading to millions of unnecessary deaths.
The problems don’t stop there. Even EU citizens who don’t smoke are suffering because of this policy failure from Brussels. When politicians try to compel smokers to stop buying cigarettes through consumption taxes, smoking bans, and other hurdles, criminals fill the gap in the market with illegal, unregulated, untaxed products.
The illicit cigarette trade is booming in Europe. New KPMG data reveals Europeans consumed 41.8 billion illicit cigarettes in 2025 alone. That means more than 10% of all cigarettes in Europe are illegal. That figure rises year on year. Criminal gangs funnel billions in illicit cigarette profits into drug trafficking, violence, and even terrorism. Failed smoking bans endanger everyone.
A whopping 82.5% of smokers say lower prices are the main reason to smoke black-market cigarettes. The rest say product taste and availability is better with illegal sellers. High taxes and tough regulations are directly behind the boom in black-market cigarettes.
The EU’s aggressive approach is not working. Taxes and bans do not eliminate smoking behaviour – they displace it. Sweden shows the route to a smokefree Europe, but Brussels doesn’t want to hear it – that is, until the European Parliament wants to write a social media post bragging about helping smokers quit. Brussels is happy to take the credit for Stockholm’s success, even when its policies are pulling in the opposite direction.
At the bottom of that image posted on X showing Sweden’s low smoking rate is a telltale line in smallprint: “This data doesn’t include use of other tobacco products such as electronic cigarettes and snuff.” (Snuff is very similar to snus.) In other words, the EU is conceding that a smokefree society can – and should – still include other nicotine products, exposing the flaws in its policies.
If Brussels is serious about making Europe smokefree, it should take this concession out of the smallprint and put it front and centre of EU tobacco policy, starting with the TED and TPD revisions. European smokers cannot afford more wasted years of the EU pursuing policies it knows have failed. Smokers want to quit. They just need Brussels to get out of the way so that they can access the products which will help.
