BRUSSELS : Addressing the World Nicotine Congress in Brussels on Monday, Swedish MEP Charlie Weimers delivered a scathing indictment of both the tobacco industry’s “timidity” and the European Commission’s “ideological” crusade against harm reduction.
In a speech that began by confronting the industry’s historical role in “poisoning democratic debate,” Weimers pivoted to a contemporary crisis, accusing the anti-nicotine lobby and EU officials of pursuing an “abstinence-only” agenda that he characterised as a “failure of responsibility at the highest level” and, ultimately, “a form of evil.”
Weimers opened his address with a blunt acknowledgement of the tobacco industry’s legacy, noting that their predecessors had spent decades selling “doubt” and funding studies designed to confuse the public while privately acknowledging the risks of their products.
However, he argued that the industry has now become so cautious and fearful of confrontation that it no longer dares to put forward its strongest case for alternative nicotine products. This silence, he suggested, has allowed a new moral certainty to step into the vacuum: a consensus led by the anti-nicotine lobby that seeks to eradicate nicotine entirely, regardless of the public health consequences.
Weimers argued that this “utopian” approach has as much chance of success as abstinence-only campaigns have of eradicating teenage sex, and that the opponents of harm reduction have now claimed the title of the lobbyists who “kill the most people” by blocking access to safer alternatives.
Central to Weimers’ argument was the “Swedish Model,” a policy framework grounded in effectiveness rather than purity. He highlighted Sweden’s status as being on the brink of becoming one of the first countries in the world to reach official smoke-free status, with smoking rates below five percent. This achievement, he noted, did not come from lower nicotine use, but from a shift in behaviour facilitated by the availability of snus and nicotine pouches. By choosing substitution over prohibition, Sweden has achieved some of the lowest smoking-related mortality rates in Europe, including dramatically lower rates of lung cancer and cardiovascular disease. Weimers pointed out that while the EU banned oral tobacco across the internal market in 1992, Sweden’s exemption has provided a real-world demonstration that harm reduction works.
The MEP reserved his sharpest criticism for the European Commission and Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi, whom he accused of being “increasingly detached from evidentiary standards.” He specifically targeted Várhelyi’s public claims that alternative products are “one hundred percent” as harmful as cigarettes, a statement Weimers described as a “collapse of proportional reasoning” that runs counter to scientific consensus.
He highlighted a systematic refusal by the Commission to compare vaping or nicotine pouches directly with smoking, instead instructing scientific committees to compare them only with non-smoking: a methodology he described as a deliberate choice to avoid “inconvenient” conclusions. This distortion of risk, he argued, leads to tax regimes and regulations that discourage smokers from switching to less harmful products.
In a provocative challenge to the anti-nicotine lobby and the Commission, Weimers invoked a popular internet meme, suggesting they need to take a hard look at themselves and ask, “Are we the baddies?” He argued that by denying the gradient of harm between combustible and non-combustible products, these groups are acting in an ethically indefensible way that directly contributes to preventable deaths. He urged the industry to stop being “timid” and to defend harm reduction as a moral cause, moving from a defensive posture to an offensive one.
As a direct call to action, Weimers proposed a new Key Performance Indicator for the industry: the commissioning of high-quality, independent scientific research to quantify exactly how many lives are lost due to the Commission’s current policy path. He stated his intention to take such data to the Swedish Prime Minister to force a reckoning over whether any compromise with Brussels is worth the loss of Swedish lives. Such a move, he suggested, would help summon the political courage required to challenge the EU’s stance.
Weimers concluded by framing the Commission’s failure to act on the evidence as a moral catastrophe. He argued that when preventable deaths occur on such a massive scale due to ideological rigidity rather than a lack of evidence, it transcends mere policy error. By making less harmful alternatives more expensive and less accessible, he argued, the Commission is prioritising the appearance of “doing good” over the actual preservation of life, a choice he described as a profound failure of human responsibility.
MEP Charlie Weimers Condemns EU’s ‘Ideological’ Nicotine Policy as a Failure of Responsibility
