Poland’s Nicotine Pouch Flavor Prohibition and Vape Restrictions Risk Driving Consumers Back to Cigarettes, Creating Black Market

Prohibition Does Not Work (PDNW), an international coalition of over a dozen think tanks and policy experts around the world, including the Warsaw Enterprise Institute, warned that Poland’s proposed ban on disposable vapes and flavored nicotine pouches risks pushing consumers back toward cigarettes and expanding the black market.

"This policy is fundamentally anti-health, because restricting lower-risk nicotine alternatives is likely to entrench - and potentially strengthen - the habit of smoking conventional cigarettes" said Sebastian Stodolak, Vice-President of the Poland-based Warsaw Economic Institute. "Evidence from tobacco-harm-reduction research consistently shows that products such as nicotine pouches and e-cigarettes can substitute for combustible tobacco, which is responsible for the vast majority of smoking-related disease. Removing these alternatives does not eliminate nicotine demand; it merely redirects many users back toward the most harmful form of consumption. The measure is also anti-freedom, as it restricts adults’ ability to choose less harmful products and substitutes paternalistic regulation for individual autonomy. In this sense, it conflicts with the basic principle of human dignity that individuals should retain agency over personal risk-related decisions affecting their own bodies."

“If Poland makes safer nicotine products harder to access than cigarettes, the predictable result will be more smoking, and the creation of a giant unregulated black market” added PDNW Spokesman Tim Andrews. “Every time governments try to prohibit safer alternatives, they end up protecting the cigarette market instead.”

A nationwide survey commissioned by PDNW Partner The Tholos Foundation found 88 percent of Polish nicotine pouch users say flavors were a key reason they switched away from cigarettes.

The same research found:

• One-third of users say they would seek products through cross-border or online markets if flavors are banned

• One-third say they would return to smoking

• Only 6 percent say they would quit nicotine entirely

“When governments ban safer nicotine products, people don’t magically quit,” Andrews said. “They either go back to cigarettes or they find the products somewhere else.”

Evidence from elsewhere in Europe shows how prohibition can backfire. A recent PDNW report on Germany found that attempts to prohibit nicotine pouches have failed to eliminate their use with over 1.4 million Germans using illicit products sourced from the black market. i

By contrast, countries that embrace harm reduction are seeing dramatic public health gains. Sweden now has the lowest smoking rate in Europe, largely due to widespread access to smoke-free nicotine alternatives.

“Sweden followed the science and nearly eliminated smoking,” Andrews said. “Poland risks repeating the mistakes of prohibition instead. Rather than repeat the policy failures seen in other countries such as Germany, Polish lawmakers should accept the overwhelming evidence and adopt progressive, risk-proportionate regulation which helps smokers quit. Millions of lives depend upon it”