Just days after receiving the green light from Brussels and pressure from civil society, France officially banned nicotine pouches on 6 September, with the prohibition to take effect from March 2026.
Given nicotine’s toxicity and highly-addictive nature for young people, leading anti-tobacco associations like France’s Alliance Against Tobacco (L’Alliance contre le tabac) have celebrated this bold move as an important “victory” for public health.
Framed by French Health Minister, Catherine Vautrin, as part of Paris’s wider combat against the “risks associated with addiction” and the rising incidence of youth nicotine poisonings, the pouch ban adds to a string of recent tobacco-related measures positioning France as a leader in this space, including bans on disposable e-cigarette sales and smoking in certain public spaces.
Big Tobacco has responded with predictable outrage, echoing the tobacco control opposition increasingly expressed by the EU’s industry-aligned member-states. Indeed, the tobacco industry has spent decades blocking meaningful EU reform, contributing to Europe’s persistently-high smoking levels and rising illicit tobacco trade. As the EU gears up to free its tobacco control regime of Big Tobacco influence, France’s emerging leadership could not be more critical.
France at heart of European fight
In Europe’s anti-tobacco crusade, France has become a key battleground. As the Alliance Against Tobacco (ACT) rightly noted following France’s ban, “nicotine pouches and new nicotine products are the new financial El Dorado for cigarette manufacturers” amid dwindling cigarette consumption, adding that these falsely-billed “weaning tools…only aim to expand the nicotine addiction market.”
The tobacco industry’s aggressive reaction unwittingly reflects this truth: British American Tobacco (BAT) has criticised France’s “dogmatic approach” and warned smokers would lose “regulated alternatives” to tobacco, while Philip Morris International (PMI) has similarly condemned Paris for “persisting with an ineffective ban strategy.” The ACT had already warned of this industry opposition in July, joining nine other European NGOs in spotlighting Big Tobacco’s growing EU policy influence.
This op-ed notably highlights how the EU Commission’s response to France’s February notification of its plan to ban oral nicotine products was stalled by fierce tobacco industry lobbying as well as political pushback from ‘allied’ member-states. Tellingly, Italy, Greece, Romania, and the Czech Republic – which have cumulatively received billions in manufacturing facility investments from PMI, BAT and JTI – formally opposed the French ban.
Beyond oral nicotine, France has joined forces with the Netherlands and other member-states to push for higher EU tobacco taxes in recent months – a move also opposed by the same ‘usual suspect’ countries – amid record-high EU illicit tobacco levels hitting France and the Netherlands hardest. Crucially, this plague is fueled by cross-border sales from low-tax border states like Luxembourg, which the tobacco industry deliberately oversupplies to bypass tougher regimes in Paris and The Hague.
Big Tobacco’s shadowy hold on EU track-and-trace
Unfortunately, Big Tobacco’s hand in Europe’s illicit tobacco trade runs deeper than driving the parallel trade through its oversupplying of low-tax markets. Not satisfied with circumventing strong tax regimes – while wrongly blaming them for Europe’s illicit trade – the tobacco majors have long exerted influence over the EU’s anti-smuggling traceability system, which, if effective, would cut into its illicit trade profits.
Mirroring its use of ‘friendly’ member-states, the tobacco industry mobilised a web of front companies and allied firms to operate key components of the EU system implemented by the Commission in 2019, including Swiss firms Inexto and Dentsu Tracking as well as France’s Worldline, Atos and four of Atos’s subsidiaries. Through them, Big Tobacco has promoted the PMI–developed Codentify system – a technology widely criticised by WHO leaders and tobacco control experts worldwide for its violation of WHO FCTC standards.
Operating through the Digital Coding and Tracking Association (DCTA) – a front group created by PMI, BAT, JTI, and Imperial to falsely present the system as independent and WHO-compliant – the industry sold Codentify to Inexto in 2016. What’s more, Atos helped develop Codentify, promoted the system across Asia, and worked with the DCTA to facilitate its implementation in Lithuania.
Worldline, a former Atos subsidiary, even urged the EU in 2015 to adopt “an industry-operated solution” while concealing Atos’s Big Tobacco links – flagrant breaches of the WHO FCTC and its Illicit Trade Protocol (ITP). This tobacco industry-driven lobbying effort ultimately secured Codentify’s remnants within the EU system. In addition to Inexto, which admits to deriving the vast majority of its revenue from tobacco firms, Dentsu Tracking inherited key parts of Codentify through its 2017 takeover of the system’s co-developer, Blue Infinity.
Industry allies’ changing fortunes
Encouragingly, these firms’ tobacco industry ties have been increasingly exposed in recent years, leading to their declining fortunes in Europe and beyond. Last October, Inexto was excluded from an Ethiopian track-and-trace tender for failing to comply with the WHO Protocol and prove its financial independence from the industry, a blow that followed similar public tender and contract exclusions in Argentina and Pakistan. Inexto has even been barred from EU public tenders, yet it paradoxically retains a role in the bloc’s system.
Meanwhile, Atos has been dismantled as a group and Worldline has seen its value collapse after repeated failures of its core digital systems worldwide, underscoring how digital-only technology remains unreliable and risky for consumers. These firms have since abandoned their tobacco traceability divisions, unable to demonstrate compliance with WHO FCTC rules, leaving Dentsu as the last one standing – a position unlikely to endure.
Indeed, Dentsu faces mounting criticism from MEPs and NGOs for winning its Commission contract without an open public tender and for neglecting to register in the EU Transparency Register despite years of tobacco-backed lobbying. Moreover, the EU system’s utter ineffectiveness in curbing the surging illicit trade across the EU and the UK – where Dentsu runs a similar scheme – is an unmistakable sign of defeat. Hardly surprising, as this industry-aligned system was never intended to stop the illicit trade, but to create the illusion of oversight while concealing Big Tobacco’s complicity.
Even Big Tobacco’s latest attempts to promote the Codentify-linked system through PSQR – a FractureCode member of the industry-created Coalition Against Illicit Trade (CAIT) – are failing to convince public authorities of its neutrality and ability to effectively tackle illicit trade.
Time to strike back
With political and civil society pressure intensifying, and even the Commission’s DG TAXUD acknowledging the EU system’s failure to tackle illicit tobacco, the industry’s position is weaker than it has been in years, offering a key chance to push back. France is well placed to lead: on 24 September, MP Frédéric Valletoux will host a National Assembly event where members of the parliamentary Social Affairs Commission will grill Big Tobacco representatives over the industry’s role in France’s soaring parallel trade.
Paris’s increasingly strong tobacco control stance signals a turning point in Europe’s fight against addiction, yet momentum must not stall. As Brussels advances its long-awaited overhaul of tobacco regulation to align with the WHO Protocol – an essential step toward the EU Commission’s goal of a tobacco-free generation – France and its allies have the opportunity to break Big Tobacco’s grip and shape a framework that places public health above industry interests.
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France’s nicotine pouch ban reflects rising anti-tobacco leadership at key moment for EU