The WHO hates how Sweden is saving lives

Cigarettes are legal. Zyn is the problem, says the World Health Organization. As it warns about nicotine pouches on World No Tobacco Day, Sweden offers a real-world lesson in tobacco harm reduction.

Walking down Drottninggatan, Stockholm’s sprawling pedestrian shopping street, I kept expecting to smell cigarettes.

You know the smell. Every Western city has it lingering outside office towers and train stations. Toronto smells like it. Ottawa smells like it. Calgary definitely smells like it after midnight outside the bars.

After spending a week in Stockholm, I literally did not see a single cigarette. Not in someone’s mouth. Not even one on the ground.

The realization hits slowly at first. You notice what isn’t there before you notice what is. No clusters of smokers outside restaurants. No overflowing ash trays beside benches. No cloud of stale smoke at bus stops.

Then you start noticing the nicotine.

A Swede in jogging shorts out enjoying the spring heat slips a tiny white pouch into her lip. Two young men outside a café across the street do the same thing between sips of coffee. Construction workers, airport staff, university students. Nobody hides it.

Then I saw the stores.

On a prime corner lot near Olof Palmes Gata sat a sleek storefront with giant glass windows and a glowing sign reading VAPE & SNUS. Inside looked less like a smoke shop and more like an Apple Store. Bright white lighting. Minimalist shelves. Rows of colourful nicotine pouches, vapes, and snus tins displayed openly to pedestrians walking by.

One woman, in a mustard yellow blouse, was even pushing a stroller through a store dedicated entirely to smoke-free nicotine products.

In Canada, that storefront would trigger a large-scale moral panic.

Canadian vape stores cannot legally display products in windows. Nicotine pouches are hidden behind pharmacy counters, often requiring an awkward conversation with a pharmacist to access them. Meanwhile, any 18-year-old working his first shift at a gas station can legally sell cigarettes all day long without anyone blinking.

Progressive Swedes would be disgusted with our prehistoric approach to nicotine harm reduction.

A Canadian teenager can buy a pack of darts more easily than a tin of Zyn.

You might be able to guess which country has nearly eliminated smoking.

In fact, Sweden stands apart from almost every country in Europe. It has one of the continent’s lowest smoking rates and some of the lowest rates of smoking-related disease.

Today, on World No Tobacco Day, the World Health Organization launched a campaign warning about nicotine pouches and other smoke-free products. WHO Director-General (and former Tigray Communist from Ethiopia) Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and his organization continue to frame nicotine itself as the central public-health threat, even as countries like Sweden demonstrate what happens when smokers are given alternatives that do not involve inhaling burning tobacco.

The disconnect is remarkable.

While WHO officials issue warnings about nicotine pouches allegedly appealing to youth, Sweden has spent decades quietly replacing cigarettes with snus and other smoke-free products. The result has been fewer smokers, fewer smoking-related illnesses, and one of the strongest tobacco harm-reduction records in the developed world.

The Swedes did something international public-health institutions still seem deeply uncomfortable admitting might work.

They separated nicotine from smoke.

That distinction matters more than almost anything else in this debate.

The overwhelming damage from cigarettes comes from combustion. Burn tobacco, inhale smoke for decades, and the human body breaks down exactly the way you would expect it to. Lung cancer. Throat cancer. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Cardiovascular disease.

Sweden did not eliminate nicotine.

Sweden displaced smoke.

And the results become visible almost immediately walking through Stockholm.

At Philip Morris’ Technovation conference this week, executives, scientists, and harm-reduction advocates kept returning to the same basic argument: public health became obsessed with achieving nicotine purity instead of reducing actual harm.

To many North Americans, especially after COVID, the broader philosophical pattern feels familiar.

Sweden became internationally infamous during the pandemic for resisting lockdown orthodoxy while much of the Western world embraced sweeping social restrictions. Public-health elites treated the country almost like a rogue state. Newspapers predicted mass death. Commentators accused Sweden of recklessness.

Now the same country is once again standing outside the global consensus, this time on smoking.

And once again, Sweden’s outcomes are deeply inconvenient to international institutions.

One speaker at the conference made an offhand comment that explained the entire country better than any policy paper could.

“Sweden tends to trust adults.”

That mindset appears everywhere here.

The Swedish approach to nicotine is pragmatic rather than moralistic. The goal is straightforward: get people off cigarettes by giving them alternatives they will actually use.

In Canada, the governing philosophy often feels reversed. Regulators treat smoke-free nicotine products with suspicion while combustible cigarettes remain readily available through decades of regulatory inertia.

The result is bizarre.

A brightly lit nicotine pouch display in Stockholm feels modern, clean, and ordinary. In Canada, the exact same display would likely provoke outrage from public-health activists demanding investigations, fines, and restrictions.

Meanwhile, cigarette packs remain available at nearly every gas station in the country.

The Swedes look at this logic the same way most people would look at banning seatbelts while protecting car crashes.

Even Philip Morris International, the tobacco giant hosting the conference, now openly talks about putting cigarettes “in a museum.” Ten years ago, that sentence would have sounded absurd coming from one of the largest cigarette companies on earth. Today, the company says more than 40 percent of its revenue comes from smoke-free products.

You do not need to trust multinational tobacco companies blindly to recognize the contradiction staring public-health authorities in the face.

If Sweden dramatically reduced smoking-related disease through the widespread adoption of smoke-free nicotine products, why does the World Health Organization sound more alarmed by nicotine pouches than by the cigarettes they are replacing?

That question becomes harder to ignore the longer you spend in Stockholm.

Because the city does not feel like a public-health disaster.

It feels like the future.

Editor’s Note: Rothmans, Benson & Hedges invited the author to Sweden and covered travel expenses associated with the trip. During the visit, the author toured a retail nicotine-pouch and Snus store, visited a nicotine quality-control laboratory, and attended Philip Morris International’s annual Technovation conference in Stockholm.