In late February, the World Health Organization (WHO) released new figures pointing to a troubling trajectory for Europe. By 2030, the region is expected to retain the highest tobacco-use prevalence in the world, with particularly alarming trends among women and young people.
While Europe’s overall tobacco consumption has declined in recent years, vaping and other novel tobacco products are reshaping the landscape by increasingly drawing in young people. Meanwhile, Europe remains the only WHO region not on track to meet the global target of reducing tobacco use among women by 30% by 2025, with the region’s adult female smokers representing over 40% of the global total, and girls aged 13-15 now recording the highest tobacco use among girls worldwide.
As WHO Europe’s Kristina Mauer-Stender stresses, “decades of progress” could be undone if policy fails to keep pace with a changing nicotine market. As the EU reviews its tobacco control framework, policymakers must resist tobacco industry pressure to weaken measures on emerging products and implement ambitious reforms, from robust taxation to effective traceability systems to curb illicit trade.
Novel products hooking young people
Across Europe, tobacco causes over 1.1 million deaths annually from noncommunicable diseases – a public health crisis set to persist unless governments accelerate ambitious tobacco control policies. Even the modest progress flagged by WHO Europe offers only limited reassurance: tobacco use in Europe is declining, but at a sluggish pace. Among men, prevalence fell from 47.5% in 2000 to 30.3% in 2025, while among women the drop has been far more modest, from 22.3% to 17.3%.
The regional picture remains stark, with adult tobacco usage standing at 24.1% – well above the global average of 19.5%. The outlook becomes even more concerning among younger age groups, jeopardizing the EU’s ambition of a tobacco-free generation by 2040. Roughly four million adolescents aged 13 to 15 across the European Region already use tobacco products, with the rise of e-cigarettes even more striking: at 14.3%, European adolescents show the highest vaping prevalence in the world, with rates nearly identical among boys and girls.
This rapid rise of teen vaping is no coincidence, but the predictable result of tobacco industry tactics that use flavours, branding and digital marketing to draw a new generation into nicotine use. Moreover, Big Tobacco’s relentless lobbying is responsible for the uneven regulation of e-cigarettes and other emerging nicotine products across Europe. While countries such as France, Belgium and the Netherlands are championing higher taxes on both traditional and novel tobacco products – including vapes, snus and heated tobacco – others such as Italy, Romania and Greece oppose these measures. Crucially, this regulatory division threatens to add a new layer of intra-EU tax disparities to the existing cigarette tax gaps.
EU’s uphill tobacco control battle
Against this backdrop, the WHO is urging European governments to close regulatory gaps exploited by the tobacco industry and extend tobacco control frameworks to emerging nicotine products, in line with their commitments under the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC). In the EU, these questions are playing out in negotiations over the proposed revision of the Tobacco Excise Taxation Directive (TED), which sets out ambitious minimum tax increases for cigarettes and novel nicotine products.
However, the Commission’s proposal to raise excise rates by 2028 is already facing resistance and possible delays, with a sustained Big Tobacco lobbying effort increasingly shaping the debate since the TED proposal’s unveiling last July. The industry’s influence was recently laid bare when Cyprus, less than a month into its EU Council Presidency, presented a diluted TED draft that softened key provisions, including tax levels and implementation timelines.
More recently, the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) adopted an opinion on 18 February which, while broadly favourable to an updated TED aligned with new market and public health developments, equally reflects arguments frequently promoted by the tobacco industry. The EESC opinion notably claims that “abrupt or excessive increases in excise duties, risk fuelling illicit trade, undermining fiscal revenues and weakening public health outcomes,” citing soaring illicit markets in France and the Netherlands.
Beyond contradicting the WHO’s clear evidence that taxation remains the most effective tobacco control tool, this claim also overlooks the structural driver of illicit trade within the EU: tax gaps between member-states that fuel parallel markets. Far from illustrating the failure of high tobacco taxes, France and the Netherlands instead expose the distortions created by low-tax markets such as Luxembourg, which the tobacco industry deliberately and massively oversupplies. Of the roughly five billion cigarettes supplied to Luxembourg’s market in 2024, only 610 million were consumed domestically, with nearly 90% percent flowing into parallel channels across France, the Netherlands and other neighbouring countries.
Window opening for tobacco control overhaul
This dynamic has not gone unnoticed in Paris. As revealed by French media outlet La Tribune on Sunday, 8 March 2026, National Assembly Social Affairs Committee president and former health minister Frédéric Valletoux addressed a letter to France’s Prime Minister last month decrying the consequences of the tobacco industry’s “organized oversupply” of Luxembourg and other low-tax jurisdictions. Every year, France loses an estimated €4.3 billion in tax revenue, underscoring that parallel flows of genuine, industry-supplied cigarettes pose a far greater fiscal and public health threat than the counterfeits Big Tobacco misleadingly blames on higher taxes.
Moreover, Valletoux calls on Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu to push for action at the EU level so France can implement the WHO Protocol to Eliminate Illicit Trade in Tobacco Products by 1 January 2027. The agreement, stalled in Brussels since 2018 due to persistent tobacco industry lobbying, would require manufacturers to supply volumes proportional to each country’s actual domestic demand, closing one of the industry’s most effective channels for feeding cross-border parallel markets.
Beyond the country quota mechanism, Valletoux has previously called for implementing a fully industry-independent tobacco traceability system to effectively counter the illicit trade. With the EU’s current system heavily influenced by Big Tobacco’s interests – and utterly failing at curbing the illicit market – the EU must ensure the upcoming revision of the Tobacco Products Directive (TPD) at long last embed independent traceability, as required by the WHO Protocol.
In this endeavour, the UK recently provided Europe with a compelling model. Last month, the UK selected a consortium led by independent technology providers Cartor Security Partners and SICPA to operate the country’s new vaping traceability system. Crucially, the move reinforces the case for independent, WHO-aligned traceability while recognising that regulation must now catch up with soaring youth vaping across Europe.
Indeed, Europe’s declining smoking rates risk masking a new generation becoming hooked on nicotine. Amid this growing crisis, the EU’s TED and TPD revisions are a critical test of political resolve, requiring stronger taxation, tighter controls on novel products and effective anti-smuggling enforcement. If Europe is serious about protecting young people and reversing stubborn trends among women, it must act now with clarity and ambition.
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