South Korea taxes nicotine pouches at more than four times the rate it taxes a pack of cigarettes. A new report from Smoke Free Sweden compares the results of that approach with Sweden’s, and the numbers speak for themselves. 

In the last decade, Sweden has slashed its smoking rate to become the first smoke free country in the world. It has done so by taxing and regulating smoke-free alternatives much less harshly than cigarettes. South Korea has done the opposite, and its daily smoking rate has stalled at 15.3%, almost three times Sweden’s, with smoking still killing more than 68,000 people a year. 

The logic is simple. If a safer product costs much more than the deadly one it’s meant to replace, people will keep buying the cheaper, deadlier one. That’s what’s happening in Korea. Policymakers who won’t distinguish between combustible and non-combustible products aren’t protecting public health, they’re standing in its way. 

A regulation built on false equivalence

Equivalent taxation isn’t a mistake. It’s the symptom of a wider regulatory choice. Under Korea’s Tobacco Business Act, combustible and smoke-free products are classified and treated in essentially the same way. Nicotine pouches face the same restrictions on marketing, retail and distribution as cigarettes. Advertising is tightly controlled, retail channels are limited, and online sales are banned outright, cutting off exactly the kind of consumer access and awareness that helped Sweden’s smokers switch.

The numbers show what that costs. Korea’s official target is to bring smoking down to 25% among men and 4% among women by 2030, but current trends suggest that pace isn’t achievable under the existing framework. The gender gap alone is striking: 26.8% of men smoke daily compared with 3.8% of women, a divide the report suggests reflects how unevenly current products and messaging reach different groups of smokers. Meanwhile, smoking-attributable healthcare costs in Korea have climbed to nearly US$3.4 billion a year, even as the smoking rate has barely moved.

The report’s own recommendations for Korea read like a checklist of everything Tobacco Excise Directive negotiators in Brussels and European Commission officials working on the update of the Tobacco Products Directive should do: move from harmonization to risk-proportionate taxation, treat nicotine pouches as a distinct, less harmful category rather than folding them into tobacco rules by default, and use public health messaging to raise awareness of switching rather than blur the risk difference. That’s precisely the direction South Korea hasn’t taken, and precisely the direction some EU proposals are pulling away from too.

Why the South Korean example matters for the EU

Europe is deciding right now whether to go down the same road, and not just on taxation. The Tobacco Excise Directive, still being negotiated in the Council, will set how EU member states tax vapes, nicotine pouches and heat-not-burn products relative to cigarettes for years to come. The proposal on the table would push these products toward tax parity with cigarettes, or even above it: the same framework that’s holding Korea back.

The Tobacco Products Directive revision raises the same question from the regulatory side rather than the fiscal one. The debate taking shape around it echoes the same policies that shaped Korea’s Tobacco Business Act: treat every nicotine product as if it carries the same risk as a cigarette, regardless of whether it’s burned or not. Korea shows where that instinct leads: stalled progress, a growing health bill, and smokers with less reason to switch.

Sweden shows the alternative, one already inside the EU. In December 2024, its parliament rewrote its national tobacco strategy to target harm rather than just consumption, and cut excise on snus while raising it on cigarettes. The result: the lowest smoking rate and lowest tobacco-related disease burden in Europe.

Tax and regulation together decide which product is cheaper, easier to find, and easier to understand; and that decides what smokers buy. Korea set those incentives backwards. Sweden set them right. The EU is choosing between those two models right now. They should choose Sweden’s.