Considerate Pouchers have written to Minister Carroll MacNeill, Ireland’s Minister for Health in response to recent criticisms aimed at nicotine pouches. We reached out to the minister on behalf of our Irish members.
To: Minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill
Department of Health
Nicotine Pouches and Harm Reduction – Policy Must Be Based on Evidence
Dear Minister Carroll MacNeill,
I am writing on behalf of Huomaavaiset pussit, a global consumer advocacy group committed to tobacco harm reduction. We have members in Ireland who are deeply concerned by your recent comments describing nicotine pouches as “horrible,” “invidious,” and “one of the worst inventions of all time,” and your stated intention to eradicate them. I myself quit smoking using nicotine pouches and find this position harmful given the life saving potential of the product.
This stance ignores overwhelming scientific evidence, risks worsening the issue and may even push people back into smoking. By banning one of the least harmful ways to consume nicotine available to adult smokers, the Irish government risks increasing smoking related disease, fuelling black market supply, and undermining your own smoke-free goals.
Nicotine pouches do not contain tobacco, involve no combustion, and generate dramatically lower levels of toxicants than cigarettes. According to a 2024 review published in BMC Public Health, they are among the cleanest nicotine delivery systems available:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381481879
The most comprehensive relative-risk assessment of nicotine products to date (Murkett et al., 2022) gave nicotine pouches a risk score of just 0.1 compared to 100 for cigarettes, 61 for tobacco pipes, and 2.7 for e-cigarettes:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphar.2025.1547073/full
This puts pouches on par with traditional nicotine replacement therapies such as chewing gum and lozenges, which your government already supports through the health service.
Nicotine itself is not the cause of smoking-related disease or illness. The Royal College of Physicians and Public Health England have both stressed that nicotine, while addictive, is relatively low-risk. The harms of smoking come from tar and toxicants generated from combustion, not the nicotine content.
Pouches are not a gateway to smoking but instead they are a way out. A 2024 clinical trial published in Nicotine & Tobacco Research found that even among smokers not intending to quit, those given 4mg pouches reduced daily cigarettes by 45%, with 8% quitting entirely:
https://academic.oup.com/ntr/article/26/9/1150/7623369
While Ireland’s smoking rate remains high at around 18%, Sweden – which embraces harm reduction and allows pouches and snus – is now under 5%, with the lowest tobacco-related mortality in Europe:
https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-022-13441-0
If the goal is to reduce death and disease from smoking, then the science is clear: we must provide low-risk nicotine alternatives to adults who cannot or will not quit nicotine entirely. Total nicotine abstinence is not realistic for many smokers, and it should not be a precondition for saving lives.
We fully support regulation to keep pouches out of the hands of children. Age restrictions, responsible retail licensing and enforcement are all appropriate. But preventing adult smokers’ access to the product is counter productive when looking to reduce smoking rates.
Finally, it is dangerous to think prohibition solves the problem. Banning nicotine pouches will drive demand to the black market, where untested products with extreme nicotine concentrations are already available to Irish consumers online.
Smoking kills over 4,000 people in Ireland every year. Denying smokers access to safer alternatives is not a precaution – it’s policy failure with a death toll. As a consumer group, we urge your department to follow the science, regulate responsibly, and give smokers a real chance to quit. Nicotine pouches, used by informed adults, are not a threat to public health – they are an important part of the solution.
Sincerely,
Richard Crosby
UK Director
Huomaavaiset pussit
www.consideratepouchers.org
hello@consideratepouchers.org
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