According to a leaked European Commission report obtained by Euractiv, Brussels has come up with yet another plan to slug the poorest in society with even more taxes. Faced with chronic mismanagement of its own finances and a widening budget shortfall, the Commission’s solution is not to cut wasteful spending but to expand highly regressive so-called “health taxes” — including new EU-wide minimum excise rates on lifesaving quit-smoking products like vapes, heated tobacco, and nicotine pouches.
If the Commission were serious about public health, it would embrace tobacco harm reduction — the one strategy that actually works. Sweden is set to become the world’s first smoke-free country precisely because Swedes switched en masse to safer nicotine products like snus and modern nicotine pouches.
Yet rather than following the evidence, Brussels is determined to run in the opposite direction. The Commission continues to ban snus and wants to raise taxes on vapes and pouches — policies guaranteed to keep people smoking and dying. Worse still, Health Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi has been actively lying about reduced-risk alternatives on Twitter. He claimed vapes and pouches carry risks “comparable to smoking” (they do not), and even pushed the long-debunked “popcorn lung” myth — so blatantly false that ETHRA was forced to issue a formal correction letter. These are not innocent errors. This is deliberate misinformation from the man shaping EU health policy, used to justify tax hikes that will push smokers back to cigarettes — the only nicotine product that actually kills.
The new tobacco taxes — expected to raise a staggering €15 billion annually, making them one of the Commission’s largest revenue sources — will not raise anything close to that in reality. If Brussels thinks tax hikes automatically increase revenue, it should study Australia, the single most catastrophic example of tobacco taxation anywhere in the developed world. Canberra spent a decade hiking cigarette excise until a legal pack cost €25–€30. The result was not higher revenue or lower smoking rates, but an explosion in the illicit tobacco market so large that legal revenue has essentially collapsed. After the latest tax increases, Australia has lost roughly half of its expected legal tobacco receipts as smokers shift to the black market. Stores have been firebombed, organised crime has taken over distribution, and the government now collects a shrinking fraction of what was once a stable tax base. This is the model Brussels is preparing to copy.
Nor does the absurdity stop at tobacco. The leaked report encourages member states to introduce taxes on “ultra-processed foods,” despite the fact that the definitions are vague, contradictory, and politically manufactured. Even the studies Brussels cites admit that the evidence for long-term health benefits is thin. And if anyone doubts the predictable consequences of moralistic taxation, they should revisit Australia’s infamous “alcopops tax,” which the EU has also flirted with. Sold as a measure to curb youth drinking, it simply pushed drinkers toward stronger self-mixed spirits, consumed more dangerously and with fewer controls — a public-health disaster any adult could have predicted.
All of this comes during the worst cost-of-living crisis Europe has seen in decades. Families are struggling with rent, food, heating, and transport, and Brussels’ master plan is to make their weekly shop even more expensive. These taxes aren’t just misguided — they are regressive to the point of cruelty, deliberately targeting the most vulnerable people in society to paper over the EU’s own budgetary failures.
If Brussels truly cared about public health, it would expand access to reduced-risk nicotine products, stop spreading misinformation, abandon pointless food taxes, and stop repeating policies that have failed everywhere they’ve been tried. And if it actually cared about its budget deficit, it would cut wasteful spending instead of squeezing more money from the people least able to pay.
Europe deserves better than another round of prohibitionist vanity projects and grubby revenue-raising masquerading as health policy. Millions of lives quite literally depend on it.