The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, is calling for member states to treat safer nicotine products like cigarettes by banning use of vapes and heated tobacco products (HTP) from a wide range of outdoor spaces.
A new proposed revision of the European Council’s 2009 Recommendation on smoke-free environments urges the 27 EU members to ban vaping and HTP use in the outdoors spaces of cafes and restaurants, workplaces, transportation facilities, health care and educational facilities, amusement parks and shopping malls, among others.
In the name of protecting “children, minors or vulnerable people,” the proposal also urges national governments to consider “the inclusion of other areas, such as private cars” in vaping bans.
“The current Council Recommendation cannot fully achieve its protective purpose due to the lack of coverage of outdoor spaces,” the proposal states.
“The World Health Organization,” it continues, “highlights that second-hand emissions from emerging products can expose people to potentially harmful levels of particulate matter and key toxicants.”
The WHO has adamantly opposed access to harm reduction options like vapes and HTP, frequently spreading misinformation about them.
Yet research on so-called “passive vaping” has found that even in indoor spaces, exhaled vapor is so diluted, and disperses so quickly, that it poses little risk to bystanders. Other research has indicated that any risks to children are likely minimal and certainly far lower than those of secondhand smoking, which vaping typically replaces.
“The real purpose has always been to make it harder to be a smoker, and now a vaper, by excluding people from social settings.”
Dr. Roberto Sussman, a senior researcher at the Institute of Nuclear Sciences, National Autonomous University of Mexico, is a physicist who has studied secondhand vapor. He previously told Filter that droplets of the components which typically make up particles from vapes “readily evaporate and gas disperses in a very short time (under one minute).” He compared this with air pollution originating from combustion sources, with complex and toxic chemical compositions which remain in the environment.
That’s for indoor spaces. Meanwhile, “the justification for banning smoking or vaping is much weaker outdoors than indoors,” tobacco harm reduction expert Clive Bates, of Counterfactual Consulting, told Filter.
“The real purpose,” he added, “has always been to make it harder to be a smoker, and now a vaper, by excluding people from social settings.”
The addition of vaping to widespread outdoor bans of smoking would be a particularly harmful form of stigmatization, advocates believe. It would reduce the visibility of reduced-risk alternatives, and play into the widely believed myth that using these is as harmful as smoking—cutting the chances of more people switching from deadly cigarettes.
“They need to recall that a quarter of Europeans still smoke, and the best and fastest way for many to quit will be vaping. So why would they put barriers in their way?”
A recent survey in the nearby United Kingdom found that 50 percent of people who smoke believe that vapes are as harmful as cigarettes or worse—a figure that has risen substantially in recent years.
Bates accused the European Commission of being “indifferent” and “unresponsive” to the needs of ordinary people. “They need to recall that a quarter of Europeans still smoke, and the best and fastest way for many to quit will be vaping,” he said. “So why would they put barriers in their way?”
European states will not automatically adopt the European Commission’s recommendations; each country will have to decide whether to incorporate them into its own legislation. However, when the proposal forms part of the EU’s Beating Cancer Plan—intended to create a “tobacco-free generation,” with under 5 percent of the population using tobacco by 2040—states will be motivated, or pressured, to comply.
It is likely that most countries, if not all, will do so, according to Damian Sweeney, a partner of the consumer group European Tobacco Harm Reduction Advocates (ETHRA).
“I think what we’ve seen here is another case of ideology, and not science, driving public policy.”
Sweeney told Filter that when a huge problem already exists in getting the general public to understand the relative risks of vaping and smoking, “to conflate secondhand smoke with secondhand aerosol will only add to the confusion, damage trust in public health, and possibly increase smoking.”
“I think what we’ve seen here is another case of ideology, and not science, driving public policy,” he added. “It’s better that decisions on vape policy are left to those best able to take them: the owners and operators of properties to which the vaping policy applies, not European institutions.”
In 2023, ETHRA responded scathingly to a public consultation held by the European Commission before it drafted its revised document. “The intention to extend this recommendation to Safer Nicotine Products is not based on science and is counterproductive to public health,” ETHRA stated. The group gave detailed evidence for why smoking and vaping should not be lumped together, and of the risk that banning use of safe nicotine products in public spaces could increase smoking. The letter was ignored by the Commission.
Some European politicians have also expressed dissent. Among them is Dr. Peter Liese, a German European Parliament member and health policy spokesperson for the parliament’s largest coalition, the European People’s Party, who is also a medical doctor.
“For heavy smokers who otherwise cannot quit, e-cigarettes are an important tool to reduce harm and risks,” he said. “I do not think it is effective to equate them with tobacco smoke in the proposal for the Council recommendation. I hope the member states will correct this point.”
When the European Commission itself has documented continuing high rates of smoking among member countries, with 700,000 annual related deaths, its recommendations run counter to extensive evidence of safer nicotine options as highly effective smoking cessation tools.
Photograph by Vaping360 via Flickr/Creative Commons 2.0