A GINN response to “The war on snus”
The Cyprus Mail article “The war on snus” highlights a regulatory paradox that is becoming increasingly familiar across Europe: nicotine pouches are treated as an urgent public-health threat, while combustible cigarettes remain legally available, widely sold, and socially embedded. From a GINN perspective, the issue is not whether nicotine pouches should be regulated, but how they are regulated and whether that approach reflects evidence, proportionality, and real-world public-health outcomes.
Using the Cyprus debate as a case study, three themes stand out clearly: regulatory limbo, distorted risk messaging, and a missed opportunity for smokers seeking to move away from combustion.
A product caught in a legal vacuum
As described in “The war on snus”, nicotine pouches in Cyprus were abruptly classified in October 2024 as pharmaceutical products. This decision effectively rendered them illegal overnight, as no manufacturer holds a marketing authorisation under medicines law. At the same time, pouches were excluded from smoking-control legislation, leaving no practical mechanism for age limits, product standards, taxation, or enforcement.
The result is not tighter control, but regulatory absence. Retailers are blamed for selling products that arrived without a framework, regulators issue warnings about health risks, and consumers are left navigating contradictory messages. Meanwhile, the products themselves continue to circulate informally, beyond any meaningful oversight.
From a regulatory design standpoint, this is the worst possible outcome: neither prohibition nor regulation, but a grey market where the state has no leverage.
Addiction is not the policy question
A central contradiction highlighted in the article is the justification for prohibition: nicotine is addictive. This is true, but it is also true of cigarettes, heated tobacco, vapes, alcohol, and many legal psychoactive substances. Addiction alone has never been a sufficient criterion for banning consumer products outright.
What “The war on snus” implicitly recognises, and what the evidence consistently shows, is that the primary driver of smoking-related disease is combustion and smoke inhalation, not nicotine itself. Non-combustible products such as snus and nicotine pouches remove combustion entirely and are consistently associated with substantially lower risks of lung cancer, COPD, and cardiovascular disease compared with continued smoking.
Cyprus, notably, has one of the highest smoking rates in Europe and a lung-cancer burden that reflects this reality, despite decades of taxation and warning campaigns. In that context, a policy that blocks lower-risk alternatives while leaving cigarettes untouched raises serious questions about proportionality and effectiveness.
Real people, real switching
One of the strengths of the Cyprus Mail piece is that it moves beyond abstraction. It documents the experience of a former smoker who failed to quit using patches, gum, and prescription aids, but succeeded after switching to nicotine pouches. Their frustration is telling: a product that finally stopped them smoking is suddenly labelled unacceptable, while cigarettes remain freely available.
This is not an isolated story. Across multiple markets, nicotine pouches are primarily used by current or former smokers with high nicotine dependence, particularly those for whom traditional cessation tools have not worked. Blocking access to these products does not remove demand, it simply redirects it.
As the article notes, Cyprus’ current approach risks handing the market to smugglers and unregulated imports. That means no age verification, no quality standards, no health information, and no tax revenue. In public-health terms, this is a step backward.
A political opening for coherence
Importantly, “The war on snus” also points to a potential way forward. Diko MP Chrysis Pantelidis argues that Cyprus currently has “the worst of all worlds”: no effective youth protection, no harm-reduction pathway for smokers, and no regulatory control. His proposal, to regulate nicotine pouches under smoking-control law rather than pharmaceutical law, would align Cyprus with more than 15 other EU member states that already treat pouches as regulated consumer products.
Retailers echo this logic. Declaring pouches illegal has not eliminated them; it has simply removed the state’s ability to shape how they are sold, to whom, and under what conditions.
From a GINN perspective, this is the critical insight: regulation is not endorsement, and prohibition is not protection.
What a proportionate framework would deliver
Read through a harm-reduction lens, “The war on snus” is ultimately a call for clarity, not deregulation. A coherent framework for nicotine pouches in Cyprus would mean:
Legal access for adult smokers to properly tested, clearly labelled products as alternatives to cigarettes, rather than reliance on unregulated imports.
Effective protection for minors through enforceable age limits, packaging rules, and marketing restrictions that apply in practice, not just in theory.
Honest public communication that distinguishes the high risks of smoking from the substantially lower risks of non-combustible nicotine, enabling informed choice rather than blanket condemnation.
Such an approach would strengthen tobacco control, not weaken it, by accelerating the move away from combustion, reducing illicit trade, and aligning Cyprus with evidence-based policies already in place elsewhere in Europe.
A GINN perspective
For GINN, the Cyprus debate illustrates a broader lesson. When regulation treats all nicotine as equally harmful, it obscures the continuum of risk and undermines public-health objectives. When products are forced into ill-fitting legal categories, the result is confusion, inconsistency, and unintended harm.
“The war on snus” shows that the choice is not between doing nothing and endorsing nicotine use. The real choice is between regulation grounded in evidence and regulatory limbo that satisfies no one, not minors, not smokers, and not the state.
Clarity, proportionality, and honesty about risk are not concessions to industry. They are prerequisites for credible public-health policy.
