home page ← Buzz@Bruss! Edition #9 ← Prevent disease, don’t script lives
Tobacco, nicotine and heart health: what the draft report says:
The Report places tobacco and nicotine firmly within the EU’s cardiovascular disease prevention agenda. It argues that newer nicotine products – including e-cigarettes, heated tobacco and nicotine pouches – should not be treated differently but regulated the same as traditional tobacco products. The report also calls for tighter rules to reduce the appeal and affordability of these products.
Yet, as the Parliament begins to frame this debate, an uneasy dynamic comes into view. The draft increasingly gravitates towards a paternalistic vision of public health – one that risks moving beyond protecting citizens’ health and into controlling how Europeans choose to live their lives. Doing so, it departs from an evidence- based approach and, at the same time, risks disrupting legitimate supply chains – affecting the production and availability of regulated products – without a clear or proven rationale.
This tendency is particularly apparent in the sections dealing with tobacco and nicotine products.
At JTI, we believe there is a better way forward – one grounded in proportionality, evidence-based policymaking and respect for freedom of consumer choice.
Regulation should reflect relative risk. Combustible cigarettes and smoke-free alternatives are not the same and treating them as such weakens harm-reduction efforts by leaving consumers in the dark about less risky product options.
Parliament should resist prohibitionist instincts, including blanket flavor bans across all product categories. The priority must remain on preventing youth access and curbing marketing abuses – not unnecessarily restricting products that can help adult smokers transition to potentially less harmful alternatives.
The report would benefit from reconnecting with the Parliament’s own thinking in the BECA1 and NCD2 debates, where tobacco harm reduction (THR) was acknowledged as part of a wider prevention toolbox. 
Taxation policy needs to stay pragmatic. Broad-brush efforts to reduce affordability risk driving consumers towards illicit markets and eroding price incentives to choose alternative products.
Finally, the tobacco policy debate itself needs rebalancing. A measured, evidence-led discussion – drawing on real-world evidence and what works in Member States – is a stronger foundation for policy than an increasingly ideological approach. A robust scientific evidence base points to clear differences in risk and does not support a one-size-fits-all approach: cigarettes and smoke-free alternatives should be treated differently. The central risk in the current framing is that it substitutes orthodoxy for evidence – and in doing so, puts legitimate economic activity, innovation and jobs at stake without sound justification.
Europe can – and should – be ambitious on cardiovascular health. But ambition is best served by choosing the right policy tools and resisting a slide into lifestyle governance. Public health policy works best when it sets guardrails and improves information, not when it tries to micromanage adult choices. Empower citizens, protect youth, enforce against abuse – and keep policy anchored in scientific evidence and proportionality.
1. The Beating Cancer Plan (BECA) is the EU’s flagship public health strategy to reduce cancer across Europe.
2. Non-Communicable Diseases (NCD)
