The European Commission is due to develop by May 2016 a priority list of at least 15 additives contained in cigarettes and roll your own tobacco that will be prohibited. The list is part of the Tobacco Products Directive strengthening the rules on the manufacture, presentation and sale of tobacco and related products, adopted in 2014.
To this end, the European Commission’s independent Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks (SCENIHR) has identified 48 single chemicals to be placed on the Commission’s priority list. The compounds have been selected because they have or are suspected to have one or more of the following properties:
- toxicity in unburned form (including carcinogenic)
- facilitating inhalation or increasing nicotine uptake, which may contribute to addictiveness
- characterising flavour, one of the factors potentially contributing to attractiveness
- formation of any kind of toxic chemicals after combustion
The full list and details about how and why single compounds were selected for the priority list can be found in the Committee’s final opinion.
To know more, please visit our section on tobacco and smoking.