The European Parliament’s draft opinion on the EU Cardiovascular Health Plan does more than threaten nicotine pouches. It exposes a troubling reality: the rapporteur driving this file does not appear to understand the most basic science behind smoking-related disease.
The draft, led by socialist rapporteur Romana Jerković, calls for sweeping restrictions on nicotine products, including nicotine pouches. Flavor bans, nicotine caps, and punitive regulation are presented as “health policy.” In reality, they reveal a profound failure to distinguish between combustion and non-combustion.
That distinction is not academic. It is the foundation of modern tobacco harm reduction.
Cigarettes cause cardiovascular disease because they burn tobacco, producing carbon monoxide, fine particulates, and thousands of toxic by-products. Nicotine pouches do not burn tobacco. They do not produce smoke. They do not expose users to these toxins.
Yet Jerković’s draft treats them as functionally equivalent. That is not caution. That is conceptual confusion.
When a rapporteur charged with shaping EU health policy cannot differentiate between the primary cause of smoking-related disease and a smoke-free alternative, the problem is no longer policy disagreement. It is competence.
The opinion proposes to regulate nicotine pouches as if they were cigarettes, while restricting how risk information can be communicated to adult consumers. This ensures that smokers trying to quit are denied clear, factual comparisons about relative harm. The result is predictable: fewer people switch, more people keep smoking.
This is not protecting health. It is mismanaging it.
Juan Rafael Taborcía, Global Spokesperson for Considerate Pouchers, said:
“If you cannot identify combustion as the driver of cardiovascular harm, you are not equipped to write cardiovascular policy. Treating nicotine pouches like cigarettes is not a policy choice, it’s a basic scientific error.”
Europe already knows what works. Where smoke-free alternatives are accessible and regulated proportionately, smoking rates fall sharply. Where lawmakers flatten all nicotine products into one punitive category, cigarettes remain dominant.
Jerković’s draft chooses the latter.
The European Parliament should be asking a serious question: how did a file of this importance end up in the hands of someone unwilling or unable to apply basic public health logic?
Because policy built on misunderstanding does not just fail.
It causes harm.
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