Bucharest: Walk past any secondary school in Romania at closing time and the evidence drifts on the air. Sweet-smelling vapour, not cigarette smoke, now marks the after-class crowd, and public health officials find the trend deeply unsettling.

That worry drives a quiet but consequential overhaul of the bloc’s tobacco rules. The European Commission opened a public consultation on 22 May, inviting citizens, doctors and industry to shape the next generation of legislation on tobacco and nicotine products.

The review builds on hard evidence. In April the Commission published an evaluation of the existing framework, and it delivered a mixed verdict. Decades of rules cut smoking and tobacco-related deaths sharply, yet a wave of novel products slipped through the cracks.

Those products are the heart of the problem. Disposable vapes, nicotine pouches and heated tobacco devices arrived faster than lawmakers could respond, and marketers aimed many of them squarely at younger users through bright colours and dessert flavours.

The health case against them keeps growing. Researchers link heated tobacco to respiratory disease and warn that vaping damages the lining of blood vessels. Regulators no longer treat these devices as a harmless bridge away from cigarettes.

Romania illustrates the stakes. The country long carried one of the Union’s heavier smoking burdens, and campaigners fear that flavoured vapes simply recruit a new generation into nicotine dependence rather than easing older smokers off it.

The Commission anchors its ambition in Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan, which sets a striking target. It wants a tobacco-free generation by 2040, defined as fewer than 5% of Europeans using tobacco. Current trends among teenagers pull hard in the opposite direction.

Officials weigh several levers. They may extend advertising bans to cover vapes, tighten rules on flavours, and revisit how the bloc taxes the newer products. Each option will spark a fierce lobbying battle between health groups and a fast-growing industry.

The Commission lays out its evaluation and the road ahead on its tobacco control pages, where the consultation responses will feed into a formal proposal expected later this year.

Industry pushes back hard. Manufacturers argue that vapes help committed smokers quit and that heavy restrictions would drive users toward an unregulated black market. They urge lawmakers to separate adult harm reduction from the genuine problem of youth uptake.

Health ministries counter that the burden of proof has shifted. With teenage vaping climbing across the continent, they say, caution now favours tighter rules rather than looser ones. The coming proposal will test how far the Union is willing to go.

This remains a sensitive area of public health, and readers who want to quit nicotine can find support through national health services across the member states.