BRUSSELS, 30 September 2026 — Nine Brussels organisations received more than €12.8 million in EU funding in the period covered by a new Free Market Foundation report. Three of them spent much of the past year arguing for higher nicotine taxes, restrictions on flavours, and rules that put alternative nicotine products in the same category as cigarettes. The course the Commission is already on.

Michael Landl, director of the World Vapers’ Alliance, said:

“The Commission writes the cheques, the same organisations send the demands back, and MEPs are told this is what civil society wants. It isn’t. The people who actually quit smoking by switching are not in that conversation.”

The European Cancer Organisation received €1.46 million from the Commission and has been among the loudest voices against vapes and pouches as tools smokers use to quit. The Smoke Free Partnership, working with a €100,000 grant, campaigned for flavour bans. The European Public Health Alliance received more than half of its budget from the Commission and used part of that funding to push for tighter rules on reduced-risk products.

On 28 September, the Parliament’s health committee, SANT, adopted its report on the implementation of the Beating Cancer Plan. The adopted text still describes new nicotine products as designed to create and maintain addiction, even though two weeks earlier, in the cardiovascular health report, Parliament had adopted language that distinguished risk between products.

Last autumn, the European Cancer Organisation and the Smoke Free Partnership met Commissioners Wopke Hoekstra and Olivér Várhelyi. In the same stretch, they were publicly pressing member states and the European Parliament to back the Commission’s revision of tobacco taxes.

“Nobody is asking to shut them up,” Landl said. “We are asking the Commission for transparency and to leave a seat for consumers as well.”