Miksi EU haluaa sinun edelleen polttavan

How the Tobacco Excise Directive punishes substitution and protects cigarette revenue

Have you ever wondered why the people who claim to care most about your health are the ones making it most expensive to stay healthy?

It’s a classic Brussels maneuver. Last week, a leaked draft of the EU’s updated Tobacco Excise Directive (TED) hit the airwaves, as raportoitu by Clearing The Air. The headline? They’ve “lowered” the proposed tax rates on nicotine pouches and vaping. They want you to think they’ve listened. They want you to think they’re being reasonable.

They aren’t.

They’ve shaved off a few pennies, but the goal remains exactly the same: to treat life-saving nicotine pouches almost exactly like the deadly cigarettes they’re supposed to replace.

The War on “Substitution”

But here’s the real kicker. If you dig into the fine print of the Council’s draft, you’ll find a sentence that should make your blood boil. They openly admit that this tax plan aims to “discourage tax-induced substitution between products.”

Read that again.

The bureaucrats are saying: “We don’t want it to be cheaper for you to quit.” They are explicitly trying to stop you from switching from a combustible cigarette, which we know kills, to a nicotine pouch, which doesn’t.

Why would they do that? If you’re a smoker looking for a way out, isn’t “substitution” exactly what you’re praying for? Not according to the Council. To them, your desire to live a longer, smoke-free life is just a “market distortion” that needs to be taxed out of existence.

You Are Their ATM

It’s not about health. It never was. It’s about revenue. The Council treats smokers and pouch users like human ATMs. They’ve realized that if everyone actually switched to safer alternatives, their massive tax windfall from traditional tobacco would vanish.

So, their solution is simple: make the alternatives so expensive that the average person, the guy working a double shift who just wants to quit the habit, simply can’t afford to make the jump. They are pricing you into an early grave to balance their books.

The “Swedish Miracle” vs. The Council’s Nightmare

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it until they listen: Sweden did it. They have the lowest smoking rates in the developed world. Not because they taxed their citizens into poverty, but because they let them choose pouches.

But the EU doesn’t like miracles. They like control. They’d rather you keep lighting up a cigarette than let you buy a pouch that they haven’t sucked dry with excise duties.

A slightly lower tax on a life-saving product is still a tax on life. At Huomaavaiset pussit, we don’t care if the tax is only slightly smaller this year, it’s still an attack on your health and your heart.

It’s time to stop letting people who don’t know your name decide how much your health is worth. If the EU really cared about “Safe Hearts,” they’d get their hands out of your pockets and let you quit smoking on your own terms, they way it has worked.

They won’t. But we will make them hear us.