BRUSSELS: The European Commission on Wednesday proposed to ban the use of flavoured heated tobacco products in Europe because of concerns about their increasing popularity and health effects.
"With nine out of 10 lung cancers caused by tobacco, we want to make smoking as unattractive as possible to protect the health of our citizens and save lives," said EU health commissioner Stella Kyriakides in a statement.
The Commission, the EU’s executive arm, said the ban was part of its ambition to decrease tobacco use in the 27-country bloc to less than five percent of the population by 2040. Flavoured heated tobacco products, much like oil for non-tobacco vaping devices, can come in a wide variety of flavours such as menthol, cherry or grape which critics say help attract younger users.
A recent Commission report decried an explosion in the sales of flavoured heated tobacco devices in the EU, giving it the right to widen an existing law from 2014 on the prohibition of tobacco products. The report also said that a conservative estimate for 2020 put the share of retail sales for these products at 3.33 percent of all tobacco products in the EU.
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