The WHO continues to treat all nicotine products as a threat, despite growing evidence that smoke-free alternatives can dramatically reduce smoking-related harm, argues Martin Cullip of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance. He says Sweden’s success with nicotine pouches and other alternatives directly challenges the WHO’s, arguing it needs reform before it does more damage to public health.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has once again shown how out of touch they are with evidence-based public health.

The WHO’s latest report on nicotine pouches is not a balanced scientific assessment, but more a moral panic document designed to justify ever-tighter restrictions on safer nicotine products regardless of the consequences for smokers.

In 130 pages, the WHO barely acknowledges that nicotine products are significantly less harmful than smoking cigarettes, a public health fact that should dominate any discussion of nicotine pouches. Pouches produce no combustion and they contain no tobacco.

Studies have shown that users are exposed to a tiny fraction of the toxicants found in cigarette smoke. For smokers unable or unwilling to quit nicotine entirely, they represent a significantly lower risk alternative. Instead, the WHO treats the products exclusively as a threat.

Exaggerating risks, minimising benefits

It is all too familiar. Whether the subject is vaping, using heated tobacco, or nicotine pouches, the WHO consistently exaggerates risks, minimises benefits, and treats innovation as suspicious.

The organisation is incapable of distinguishing between nicotine use and smoking-related disease, even though the two are starkly different in terms of health impact.

The report repeatedly warns that nicotine pouches could “renormalise nicotine use.” But this framing reveals WHO’s perverse ideology. It is no longer concerned with reducing harm, but instead eradicating nicotine use in all forms, regardless of relative risk. A position that satisfies dogmatic purists but is disastrous for public health.

Millions of people around the world still smoke cigarettes. Smoking remains one of the leading causes of preventable death globally because of inhaling toxic smoke produced by combustion.

If smokers switch from cigarettes to smoke-free alternatives such as nicotine pouches, their health risks are dramatically reduced. Any organisation genuinely committed to reducing disease and death should be actively encouraging this transition.

WHO’s ‘cult-like’ approach perpetuates smoking

Instead, the WHO devotes all its attention to the “dangers” of flavours, packaging, marketing, and branding while downplaying the overwhelming potential benefits for adult smokers. The organisation describes nicotine pouches as being marketed as “modern” and “socially acceptable,” as though making safer products appealing is somehow wrong.

This approach is almost cult-like. Of course, safer alternatives must appeal to smokers if they are to compete against cigarettes. Public health gains occur when consumers choose lower-risk products over combustible tobacco.

In fact, the WHO’s approach increasingly makes the organisation itself a vector of disease. By discouraging or restricting access to far safer nicotine alternatives, it is helping to perpetuate cigarette smoking, the very behaviour responsible for millions of deaths every year.

Policies that suppress harm reduction do not eliminate nicotine use. They perpetuate cigarette use. Every smoker deterred from switching by misinformation, fear-mongering, or excessive regulation is more likely to continue using combustible tobacco.

WHO policies protect cigarettes

In that sense, the WHO is no longer merely failing to target harm but instead actively obstructing one of the most promising public health opportunities of the modern era.

Public health policy should be about reducing disease and death, not enforcing moral purity.

The organisation likes to think it is fighting the tobacco industry, yet many of the policies it promotes end up protecting the cigarette trade from meaningful competition.

Cigarettes remain widely available in every country on earth, while the WHO encourages bans, flavour prohibitions, excessive taxes, marketing restrictions, and endless regulatory barriers for safer alternatives. A policy framework supposedly designed to weaken Big Tobacco is only reinforcing its market power.

Hostility toward truthful communications

The WHO also has hostility toward truthful communication about relative risk. Smokers are routinely denied accurate information about the dramatically lower risks associated with smoke-free products.

The organisation seems to think that if people understand safer alternatives are much less harmful, they may continue using nicotine instead of abstaining entirely. But public health policy should be about reducing disease and death, not enforcing moral purity.

The WHO criticises the tobacco industry’s historical “playbook” while itself engaging in a modern form of fear-based messaging that selectively emphasises uncertainty and worst-case scenarios.

The report repeatedly warns that “more regulation” is needed without seriously considering the damage caused by restricting access to lower-risk alternatives.

WHO ignores Sweden’s harm reduction success

It ignores successful harm reduction experiences. In countries where smoke-free nicotine products have been widely available and accepted, smoking rates have fallen sharply.

Sweden, where oral nicotine products have long been popular, now has one of the lowest smoking rates and lowest smoking-related mortality rates in Europe. Yet the WHO continues to ignore the success of Sweden.

The WHO urgently needs reform. Its current approach to nicotine threatens to slow the decline of smoking by making safer alternatives less accessible, less affordable, and less appealing.

At a time when millions still die from smoking-related diseases every year, that is not merely misguided. It is indefensible.

Martin Cullip is an International Fellow at The Taxpayers Protection Alliance’s Consumer Center and is based in South London, UK.