Smoke Free Sweden was founded in March 2023 on a straightforward observation: Sweden was on course to end smoking, and almost nobody outside Sweden had noticed. The founding research, The Swedish Experience, set out how.
Tobacco still kills more than eight million people a year, and the standard response to it has barely changed in a generation. Raise taxes, ban advertising, cover the packs in warnings, and tell smokers to stop. Those measures work, up to a point, and Sweden used all of them. So did every other country in Europe, which is why conventional tobacco control cannot on its own explain why Swedish smoking now runs at roughly a fifth of the EU average. What Sweden supplied was not a slogan but a substitute. Rather than telling smokers who could not quit to keep trying or accept the consequences, it made sure that less harmful alternatives, such as snus, nicotine pouches and vapes are legal, widely available, and taxed at rates that reflect their lower risk.
Fifty years ago the psychiatrist Michael Russell wrote a single sentence in the British Medical Journal that tobacco control has spent five decades declining to act on: ‘people smoke for nicotine, but they die from the tar.’ Nicotine is not what kills smokers. Smoke is. Any policy that treats the two as interchangeable ends up protecting the cigarette.
It is also easy to forget that Sweden was not born smoke free. Daily smoking has fallen from around 15% to 5.3% (a 75% reduction) in fifteen years, while the EU as a whole moved from 28% to 24%. Sweden also has Europe’s lowest rates of tobacco-related disease, with male lung cancer mortality 61% below the EU average.
The comparisons are sharper still. Saving Lives Like Sweden found that 2.9 million deaths in the EU between 2000 and 2019 could have been averted had other member states matched Sweden’s tobacco-related mortality. France, which banned nicotine pouches this April, took eleven years to cut adult smoking by a single percentage point, to 27%. Sweden cut its own rate by 54% over the same period.
Now, after more than three years of making that case to policymakers, journalists and health practictioners, the argument is about to be handed something it has never had, which is confirmation from the Swedish official statistics office itself.
On 16 December, Sweden’s Public Health Agency publishes its next set of official statistics on tobacco and nicotine use. Its most recent put daily smoking at 5.4% of people aged 16 to 84. In May, CAN, the Swedish Council for Information on Alcohol and Other Drugs, reported 3.7% for 2025 in its long-running survey. The threshold at which a country is considered smoke free, fewer than 5% of adults smoking daily as defined by the World Health Organization, is therefore within reach on both measures. Whether the official series crosses it in December or shortly afterwards, the destination is no longer in doubt, and Sweden will get there first.
We are counting down to that moment, though not for the sake of the statistic. Sweden will have shown that a smoke-free society is achievable within a single generation, without prohibition and without writing off the smokers who find quitting hardest. That is a result other governments can copy, and most have not.
Which is why the work is far from over. More than a billion people still smoke, most of them in countries where the alternatives that emptied Sweden’s ashtrays are banned, taxed as though they were cigarettes, or described as no better. Even in Europe there is pressure to restrict the products behind the continent’s best result. It is one thing for a government to move slowly on evidence gathered somewhere else; it is another to legislate against the only nicotine policy on the continent that has actually worked. What is missing elsewhere is not the evidence but the appetite, and the conspicuous lack of curiosity about a ten-million-person natural experiment running in full view for two decades tells you more about tobacco control than it does about Sweden’s record. It is the most useful evidence smokers anywhere have, and in December it becomes official.
