The EU Should Not Copy France’s Failed Public Health Strategy
By Arta Haxhixhemajli. Originally published on 7 June 2025 by European Interest on its website.
France, like many European countries, says it wants to become smoke-free. However, its policy direction is stubbornly ineffective. It insists on raising tobacco taxes, which simply encourages smokers to buy cigarettes illegally. Meanwhile, it attacks quitting devices, such as vapes and nicotine pouches, with new regulations, most recently a ban on nicotine pouches. These are the most effective tools we have for helping smokers quit. If we really want to make Europe smoke-free, we must confront the world as it really is, not as we wish it to be. The fight is against tobacco, not nicotine.
France’s anti-tobacco policy is not just failing among citizens; it is stuck in a broken loop of public mistrust and punitive taxation. Around 75,000 people die each year as a result of tobacco consumption, and health costs approach €150 billion annually, but the real issues run even deeper than that. France lacks a culture of evaluating public policy because messages about quitting smoking have lost credibility. Why? Because sky-high tobacco taxes are widely seen not as health measures, but as cash grabs for the government.
Around 1 in 4 French people smoke cigarettes daily. Clearly, France’s current policy direction is not doing enough to help them quit. Tobacco control in France is caught in a broken chain of events: punishment through taxation, public distrust, and outright refusal to see whether a policy helps people quit smoking. This never-ending cycle takes away credibility. People don’t believe the government is on their side.
The numbers tell a compelling tale. France has some of the highest tobacco taxes in Europe. A pack of cigarettes costs approximately €11. However, smoking rates remain stubbornly high, particularly in low-income areas. In fact, reporting from as far back as 2023 reveals almost one in three French smokers has resorted to the black market to avoid the high prices, often with no awareness of safer alternative products which could lessen harm. This is the reaction of people who feel the state is cornering them, not protecting them, and lack understanding of less harmful alternatives like nicotine pouches and vaping.
In France, there remains an air of hostility around such conversations. Harm reduction hardly appears in the national lexicon, while the international consensus grows stronger every day that switching to cleaner methods of consuming nicotine is perhaps the most important way of decreasing the incidence of tobacco-related disease. Rather than offering escape routes away from cigarette addiction, France paints all nicotine use with one brush, forgetting the smoker in the process.
This inflexibility then results in a much more serious cultural malaise: bad policy. France has often been bad at real-life measurement of public health policies and adjusting them accordingly. That has made matters worse in tobacco control, where behaviour, motivation, and economic pressure interact.
Raising taxes and repeating these old slogans about quitting just doesn’t change perceptions, especially coming from a government which most already view with a certain amount of suspicion. Smokers need action to help them quit, such as better access to nicotine products which don’t contain tobacco – not unscientific scaremongering about vaping and nicotine pouches, let alone bans on those products.
The credibility crisis is real. To be effective, health messaging must be perceived as truthful, evidence-based, and sympathetic to the population. With France, none of these conditions are ever really met. Even proposals from Brussels to introduce stricter EU-wide tobacco taxes are met with public backlash. For the French government, the health consequences seem to take second place behind the opportunity to rake in more cash through consumption taxes.
France needs a reset, starting with serious investment in harm reduction programmes which embrace the reality of nicotine addiction and offer safer alternative ways to consume nicotine without cigarettes. Second, France needs an independent evaluation of its public health policies which looks beyond tax receipts to human outcomes. Finally, the communication process must respect citizens’ intelligence and skepticism; it cannot talk down to them.
Meanwhile, at the EU level, Wopke Hoekstra, Dutch commissioner in Brussels, pushes for EU-wide tobacco taxes. France and the Netherlands are shining examples of how not to achieve the European Commission’s health goals but if Hoekstra gets his way, their failed policies will be expanded to cover the whole bloc, boosting the black market and worsening public health in the process. Thanks to similarly high domestic tobacco taxes, the Dutch are buying even more cigarettes abroad, as the price for a 20-pack in the Netherlands is around €11, with €7.80 attributed to taxes. 39% of Dutch cigarette packs originated outside the Netherlands. Around 5% were counterfeit.
Radical changes are necessary if France’s – and Europe’s – tobacco policy, now stuck in a feedback loop, are to return to reality. Increasing taxes on tobacco and cracking down on reduced-harm nicotine products – which are the solution, not the problem – stokes mistrust, grows black markets, and makes Europeans less healthy. Punishment from the state for tobacco and nicotine users will not make France better off. The only solution is a positive, forward-looking policy which offers smokers a route to quit lined with optimism, rather than lecturing and penalising them.
