The New Health Despotism: EU Commission Uses Nicotine Tax to Boost Its Clout

Enough with enjoyment! EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen (EPP) now intends to wipe out the tobacco industry worldwide, straight out of Brussels. Under the pretext of environmental protection and the abolition of tax competition between member states, a new form of political virtue-administration is emerging in Brussels: pleasure-free, risk-free, contradiction-free. Pleasure becomes a case for suspicion, enjoyment a taxable sin. Until the tobacco industry is finally extinguished for good, its last puffs are meant to fill the EU budget.

In autumn 2025, two political processes in the EU district in Brussels merge and ought to be read together. On the one hand, the draft from the European Commission for the common position of the Member States (WK 12688/2025 INIT of 7 October) for the 11th Conference of the World Health Organization (WHO) Tobacco Convention in Geneva from 17–22 November, which is to shape the global tobacco policy. On the other hand, the Commission’s initiative to impose an EU-level tobacco excise duty (TEDOR). Both approaches spring from the same logic: control, centralisation, alienation. 

In the name of environmental protection, the EU in its WHO negotiation stance has already made the transition from tobacco control to outright tobacco abolition. The worldwide production-and-consumption ban proposed by the Commission will, for environmental reasons, result in the extinguishing of the tobacco industry. Until then, however, every puff is supposed to fund Brussels. Until the industry is finally snuffed out, the EU intends via TEDOR to levy a Europe-wide tobacco tax redirecting 15% of all national tobacco duties—on top of the usual member state contributions—into the Brussels budget. This attack is, in truth, an instrument of power. With this new revenue stream, the Brussels authority aims to emancipate itself politically from the member states. Smokers will no longer pay their state, but the European Commission.

Not health, but environmental protection

In the language of the WHO documents, it is phrased innocuously: “forward-looking measures of tobacco control.” In fact, it is the beginning of a post-liberal ideology of prohibition. The EU invokes Article 2.1 of the Tobacco Convention, which permits “measures going beyond existing obligations.” Every far-reaching demand is thus legitimised. Accordingly, the von der Leyen authority declares as a long-term goal the total ban on the manufacture, import, distribution, and sale of all filtered cigarettes. In addition, the total ban of all single-use and plastic-based tobacco and nicotine products is demanded. This effectively also targets e-cigarettes and nicotine pouches. Even biodegradable filters will not be tolerated, lest they create a “false ecological legitimacy.” The principle of harm reduction, the attempt to reduce health risks through less harmful alternatives, is delegitimised by Brussels as an “industry narrative.” Those who develop less harmful alternatives are not applauded but pursued. Health and environmental protection become a substitute religion: those who sin must atone; those who live abstinently are rewarded. Freedom, responsibility and risk are replaced by a regime of societal renunciation. The EU draws a dividing line between virtue and sin. For its proposals the Commission uses Article 18 of the Tobacco Convention (on environment), rather than the health-related articles. This leads, in practice, to a market ban on tobacco and nicotine products and to the extinguishing of the tobacco industry.

Indulgence trade 2.0

But until then, the Commission intends to benefit from the annual revenues of the tobacco industry in the member states. Every drag on the cigarette means direct tax income for Brussels. In internal EU jargon this is called “Tobacco Excise Duty Own Resource”, or TEDOR. For Brussels, it is the prototype of an ‘own resource’: a tax levied not via national parliaments and transferred to Brussels but collected directly by the Commission in the member state. The moral superstructure is provided by fears regarding the still-existing tax competition resulting from various national rates on nicotine and tobacco in the internal market. Tax competition in the internal market is to be abolished. Meanwhile, EU officials profit most simply from cheap cigarettes in Luxembourg. The political innovation lies elsewhere: the EU once again tries to tax citizens directly without going through their member states. This fiscal experiment is paving the way for the EU’s becoming a state. TEDOR is not a health programme but indulgence trade 2.0: the smoker buys exemption not from sin but from his citizenship. In fact, it is about eleven billion euros annually, with which Brussels wants to finance its independence from national budgets. Tobacco tax becomes the door opener for supranational tax law.

The Swedish counter-model

In Stockholm’s Helgeandsholmen government district, they point to the success of their own Swedish model: snus, a smokeless tobacco alternative, has almost eliminated cigarette consumption in the Scandinavian kingdom. Only 5% of Swedes still smoke; tobacco-related mortality is 44 % lower than the EU average. The leader of the Sweden Democrats party in the European Parliament, Charlie Weimers, and his colleagues Dick Erixon and Beatrice Timgren (ECR group) asked the Commission, “Can the Commission envision a model where Sweden is exempt from TEDOR as regards snus and nicotine pouch products because of their cultural and historical significance?” The reply from the responsible Budget Commissioner Piotr Serafin (Poland) to Sweden was as sharp as clear: No. Tax rules apply for everyone with no exceptions for cultural heritage. Since nicotine pouches explicitly fall into the scope of TEDOR, and “in the interest of equality among Member States and a fair collection of these own resources from tobacco consumption tax, the Commission does not intend to propose exemptions for individual Member States.” Thus, the non-discrimination tax policy steered from Brussels via EU law is applied against the cultural and historical heritage of the member states. Yet Brussels ignores this evidence and will tax snus just like cigarettes. The distinction between risk reduction and damage reduction is erased. The message is clear: it is not about reducing risk but eliminating pleasure altogether. The EU does not care whether a product is less harmful. What matters is that it is consumed at all. The most effective way to control a product from creation to consumption is to abolish both the product and its market altogether.

The assault on tax sovereignty

With the TEDOR tax, the Commission grasps the core domain of national tax sovereignty. Fourteen member states have already said no in the Council of Finance Ministers. In Rome and Vienna, it is called a “fiscal sleight-of-hand”; in Athens, a “creeping loss of budget autonomy”. In Stockholm it is named clearly: tax-centralisation. The principle of ‘own resources’ has an inconspicuous but explosive logic: An EU Commission that controls its own revenue stream removes itself from member state oversight. The idea of a “European democracy”, where citizens exert influence via national parliaments, is undermined. From now on, when you buy a packet in an EU member state, you directly finance the Eurocrat administration that owes you no accountability. This attitude is not merely ideological; it is dangerous because it encourages exactly what it claims to fight: the black market.

The health endgame of the pleasure-free society

Tobacco policy is only the testing ground. Commission officials are already working on a “sugar-, fat- and salt-tax” for the programme EU4Health. The same logic, the same morality, the same temptation to over-regulation. Man as a risk factor becomes the object of bureaucratic re-education. The goal is a tobacco-free, alcohol-dampened, sugar-reduced Europe, a continent of morally controlled virtue. For the European Commission this is all “good for the human being.” Yet it builds a system that no longer trusts humans. The EU wants to educate citizens, not emancipate them. It wants to steer behaviour, not foster responsibility. The abolition of tobacco thus becomes the symbol of a broader project: the abolition of ambivalence, imperfection, humanity itself. The free citizen, the one who thinks, errs, smokes, lives, is replaced by the administratively optimised European.

The planned tobacco bans at the WHO, supported by the EU, and the EU’s own TEDOR tax are two sides of the same coin. One prohibits, the other collects. Together they form the foundation of a new European health despotism: subtle, paternalistic, morally unassailable. Under the guise of care, the EU is creating an order that eradicates pleasure as a form of freedom. Health morality replaces political judgement, the European tax state replaces democratic control.