The stricter the pouch rules, the bigger the black market

What happens when a country bans nicotine pouches, or restricts them so tightly that the legal market can barely function?

A new report from TobaccoIntelligence, The Global Illicit Nicotine Pouch Report 2026, tries to answer that. Its conclusion is simple: the stricter the rules, the bigger the illicit market tends to be.

And this is what it found.

Pouches are the fastest-growing alternative to smoking in the world. The report counts more than 20 million consumers worldwide, with annual growth of 44%.

The report also notes that a growing body of scientific evidence shows pouches to be significantly less harmful than combustible tobacco.

That combination, strong demand and a patchwork of very different national rules, is exactly what illicit sellers look for. Pouches are small and easy to carry across borders.

France: banned, but still there

France banned nicotine pouches in April. According to the report, around 200,000 adults in France use them, and the products can still be widely found.

Also, in a small survey of French pouch users, only about 4 in 10 knew the ban was coming. Three months after it took effect, that number hadn’t moved.

Under French rules, those adults now break the law just by carrying a tin. More than half of them don’t even know it.

Germany: every pouch is illicit

Germany has a de facto ban. Pouches are treated as food, and none has ever been approved. So every pouch sold there is illicit.

Yet Germany is one of the biggest pouch markets in the world, with more than 600,000 adult users, according to the report.

Where the demand goes

The report looked at online traffic to pouch retailers across the EU in 2025. The pattern is clear.

In Sweden, where pouches and online sales are legal, around 10% of online pouch traffic went to foreign websites. In countries that ban pouches or online sales, the picture flips: around 90% in Belgium and Germany, 89% in the Netherlands, and more than 90% in Italy and Finland, where online sales are banned.

Ban the product, or the channel, and people simply turn to foreign websites. Those orders are usually untaxed and outside any national control.

Low nicotine caps work the same way

It’s not just bans. The report says that in Canada and Latvia, the nicotine cap is so low that it effectively bans the category, because very few people want pouches at that strength.

It also modelled a proposed cap in Norway and found it would roughly double the volume of illicit products in the market. And the strongest pouches, with up to 50 mg of nicotine, are most often found in markets with bans or very low caps.

That’s worth remembering in Spain, where the government’s draft decree reportedly caps pouches at 4 mg.

The report suggests governments tackle the black market by:

• Making rules more consistent between countries, with enough control but without excessive restrictions.
• Writing simple rules that businesses can follow and authorities can enforce.
• Collecting better data, and cooperating more on enforcement.