The European Commission’s consultation on rewriting the European Union’s tobacco and nicotine rules drew 39,795 responses before closing Aug. 14, according to Snusforumet. Tobacco harm reduction advocates had spent weeks criticizing the questionnaire as structurally biased against lower-risk products.
The Commission opened the consultation on May 22 as part of its planned revision of the Tobacco Products Directive (TPD) and Tobacco Advertising Directive (TAD). The Commission says the feedback will inform a new legislative framework it plans to propose before the end of 2026. The revision is also part of the EU goal of reaching a “tobacco-free generation” by 2040. Any proposal would then have to move through the EU legislative process, including the European Parliament and Council.
Responses were heavily concentrated in a handful of countries, Snusforumet reported. Poland produced 14,431 responses, followed by Sweden with 3,694, Czechia with 3,150, and Spain with 2,645. Nearly 1,500 submissions came from companies, NGOs, public authorities, and other organizations rather than individuals.
European Tobacco Harm Reduction Advocates (ETHRA) published a detailed criticism of the questionnaire in July, calling it “impossible to answer” for respondents who believe nicotine products should be regulated according to relative risk. ETHRA said it found eight recurring problems across the survey’s 23 questions and accused the Commission of framing choices in ways that favored more restrictive regulation.
The revised TPD could determine how the EU handles products that barely existed when the current directive was written, including nicotine pouches. The Commission’s April evaluation of the tobacco-control framework said new tobacco and nicotine products have created regulatory challenges, particularly around youth use, while the existing framework was built primarily around cigarettes, smokeless tobacco, and first-generation e-cigarettes.
Snus remains one of the clearest examples of the EU’s product-by-product approach. The EU first prohibited certain oral tobacco products in 1992. Article 17 of the current TPD continues the ban across the bloc except in Sweden, which has a treaty exemption. The Court of Justice of the European Union upheld that framework in 2018. Nicotine pouches contain no tobacco and are not the same product as snus, but their rapid growth has made them an obvious target for the coming revision.
The consultation is now closed, but the real fight begins when the Commission publishes its proposal. Harm reduction advocates will be watching whether the Commission treats cigarettes, vaping products, snus, and nicotine pouches as products with materially different risk profiles, or simply gives them different versions of the same restrictions.
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