Less than two weeks after the European Parliament recognised that nicotine products carry different risks, its health committee backed a Beating Cancer Plan report calling for tougher rules across tobacco and nicotine categories. Critics say the two positions are difficult to reconcile – particularly as Brussels prepares its next overhaul of EU tobacco legislation.

On September 16th, the European Parliament voted by an overwhelming majority that cigarettes, e-cigarettes, heated tobacco and nicotine pouches are not all the same. 

Less than two weeks later, Parliament’s health committee backed a cancer report built around a markedly different regulatory approach.

“This isn’t a minor drafting choice. It is a strategic error,” writes Konstantinos Farsalinos, a Greek physician and harm reduction advocate, in an article calling out the contradiction.

The September 28th vote by the Committee on Public Health (SANT) concerned a report drafted by Romanian MEP Vlad Voiculescu on implementing Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan.

The report calls for EU tobacco legislation to be updated to cover e-cigarettes, heated tobacco products and nicotine pouches – with flavour restrictions, plain packaging, mandatory ingredient labelling, age verification for online sales, and higher minimum excise duties.

SANT adopted the report by 27 votes to 8, with 5 abstentions, Eunews reports.

The report is non-binding. But if adopted in plenary, it will become Parliament’s political position on cancer prevention at a sensitive moment: the Commission is preparing a revision of the Tobacco Products Directive (TPD).

Two reports, two answers

The contrast between the two votes is unusually stark.

September 16: In its response to the EU’s cardiovascular health strategy, the European Parliament recognised that nicotine products can have different risk profiles and supported differentiated excise taxation.

September 28: In the Beating Cancer Plan report, Parliament’s health committee rejected a compromise amendment stating that excise duties should reflect differences in risk between product categories.

The two texts concern different areas of health policy and are not legally equivalent. 

But on the underlying regulatory question – whether cigarettes and non-combustible nicotine products should be treated differently according to their relative risk – they point in opposite directions.

In the cardiovascular report, language equating different nicotine products was removed during negotiations. The final text instead recognised differences in risk and called for those differences to be reflected in taxation, Brussels Signal reported.

Twelve days later, that principle did not survive the health committee vote.

The adopted cancer report instead calls for higher minimum excise duties across tobacco and nicotine categories, without explicitly linking tax levels to relative risk, according to Parliament Politics Magazine.

In short, Parliament endorsed two different regulatory logics: in one report, risk differences matter; in the other, an attempt to make those differences explicit was voted down.

A call for risk-based regulation

“Recognise the different risk levels, give people accurate information, protect children, and demand evidence that our rules will actually achieve something,” Czech MEP Tomáš Kubín told Parliament Politics Magazine.

Kubín, who served as rapporteur on the EU’s tobacco tax revision in Parliament’s economic committee, says he supports strong cancer prevention.

But he argues that putting combustible cigarettes, e-cigarettes, heated tobacco and nicotine pouches in a single category ignores the evidence on how their risks differ.

Kubín also accuses the European People’s Party (EPP) of backing down from its previously stated support for risk-weighted regulation.

Italian ECR MEP Pietro Fiocchi made the same case before the vote, telling Eunews it’s “fairly well established” that some alternatives are less harmful than smoking, and that the cancer plan should reflect this.

Rapporteur Vlad Voiculescu rejects the comparison, saying the evidence on cancer is less forgiving than on heart disease and that “no nicotine product has been shown to be safe over a lifetime”.

His argument rests on a precautionary standard: lower risk does not mean no risk, and long-term evidence on newer products is still limited. Critics counter that this sets up the wrong comparison: for smokers, the realistic alternative to a lower-risk product is rarely zero risk – it’s often continued smoking.

Lessons from Sweden ignored

One case absent from the report is Sweden, which has already brought daily smoking below 5 percent – the level commonly used to define a smoke-free country, and the threshold the Beating Cancer Plan aims for across the EU by 2040.

In Sweden, daily smoking fell to 4.8 percent in 2025, down from 16 percent in 2003 – a development Farsalinos believes deserves more attention.

“There is no mention of Sweden’s smoking rate. Nor is there reference to the substantial body of epidemiological evidence showing that combustion – not nicotine – drives cancer, a fact known for 50 years,” he writes.

He argues that the report targets the very products smokers use to quit.

He also notes that the text treats alcohol as a risk to manage, while lower-risk nicotine products are treated as a threat to curtail. Prevention, he argues, should be about helping smokers stop rather than putting obstacles in their way.

“Instead of addressing smoking and expanding the methods and tools available to smokers to help them quit, we treat lower-risk nicotine products – those used as alternatives to smoking – as a threat that must be curtailed,” he writes.

“How many smokers will be forced to keep smoking?”

Farsalinos calls for European policymakers to pursue an “evidence-consistent” regulatory approach mirroring measures already adopted by Sweden: age limits, marketing restrictions, quality standards, and risk-based taxation. 

“These address the genuine youth-uptake concern without removing the route that worked for adult smokers,” he explains.

What happens next for Beating Cancer Plan report

An expected plenary vote in November is the last chance for MEPs to align the cancer report with the position Parliament took on cardiovascular health.

And the stakes go beyond a non-binding report.

The Commission is also expected to propose a revised TPD, and its proposed revision of the Tobacco Excise Directive (TED) would extend harmonised minimum taxes to nicotine pouches.

Tax rules require unanimity among member states, and in June Sweden blocked a compromise on pouch taxation, with a new vote expected in November.

For now, Parliament has given two answers to the same question. The November plenary vote will show whether MEPs intend to resolve that contradiction – or allow both positions to stand.