The Distorted Reality of “Cigars” in European Regulation

When policymakers speak about “cigars,” the word often hides a vast and dangerous confusion. The truth is that the overwhelming majority of what is officially counted as cigars are not the hand-rolled, artisanal products that most people associate with the word “cigar.

If we look at the numbers, the distortion becomes crystal clear:

• Around 90% of the volume of so-called cigars in the European market is produced by relatively few industrial companies, most of them subsidiaries of multinational giants.
• These are not cigars in the cultural or artisanal sense of the word. They are mass-produced cigarillos, wrapped in reconstituted tobacco sheets, often machine-filled, sometimes flavored or designed to look and feel like cigarettes.

At the same time, there are hundreds of small and medium-sized family firms (in Honduras, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and beyond) producing genuine, premium cigars:

Why should these artisanal companies have to suffer from the crooked practices of large multinationals?

• 100% tobacco, hand-rolled, made in small factories where families have worked for generations.
• Products that are expensive, complex, and designed for occasional adult enjoyment, not for habitual, youth-driven consumption.
• The kind of cigar that sells for €10, €15, or even €30 per piece, often enjoyed with care, like a fine wine or a special whisky.

Now let us ask a simple, practical question:
Do you really imagine an 18-year-old proudly showing his friends a humidor filled with €15 hand-rolled cigars, smoking several of them per day as if they were cigarettes?
Of course not. This image collapses under its own absurdity. The artisanal premium cigar is not and has never been a gateway for youth consumption.

And yet, by throwing premium cigars into the same regulatory basket as industrial cigarillos, governments are creating catastrophic consequences:

• Standardised packaging that erases the cultural identity of products which are in no way comparable to cigarettes or flavored cigarillos.
• Extra fees and disproportionate administrative burdens, designed for mass-market products, but which suffocate small producers who operate on thin margins.
• Market distortion, because the big industrial groups can absorb these costs and even welcome them as barriers that eliminate their smaller competitors.

Let us be clear, this is not about health protection anymore. It is about money and power. It is about using the regulatory machinery of the European Union to strengthen the grip of 28 industrial producers, while pushing hundreds of artisanal producers into extinction.

The examples are everywhere:

• A premium cigar factory in Estelí, Nicaragua, employs 300 workers who hand-roll cigars for export. Their products are sold to connoisseurs who may smoke a handful per year. Yet under the current Belgian interpretation of TPD2, that factory must comply with the same image rotation requirements and pay the same withdrawal fees as a multinational producing millions of cigarillos per month.
• In the Dominican Republic, a family-run business making 200,000 premium cigars annually faces compliance costs that rival those of an industrial operation producing 200 million units. This is disproportionate by definition.

By ignoring this distinction, regulators are not protecting consumers. They are destroying diversity, eliminating tradition, and penalising products that were never designed for mass consumption in the first place.

The TPD2 Directive itself recognises that measures must be proportionate and aimed at reducing administrative burden (Recital 36). What Belgium and other Member States are doing now is the exact opposite, piling disproportionate, irrelevant rules onto artisanal producers who were never the problem.

If this continues, Europe will see the disappearance of centuries-old family businesses, the collapse of jobs in producing countries, and the triumph of a handful of industrial conglomerates. This is not health policy. This is a tragedy of regulatory blindness, or worse, the conscious misuse of legislation for corporate advantage.

Occasional enjoyment versus daily addiction

Imagine, for a moment, that a young adult (say, 20 years old) makes a deliberate choice. Instead of inhaling mass-produced, chemically treated cigarillos or cigarettes every single day, he and his friends decide to spend their money once a week on a premium handmade cigar, enjoyed slowly, perhaps with a glass of rum or whisky.

The difference is obvious:

• A premium cigar costs €10 to €30, which in itself prevents daily, habitual consumption.
• Such cigars are not inhaled into the lungs, but savoured for flavour and craftsmanship.
• Instead of flooding the body with the additives, chemicals and combustion by-products of industrial products, the exposure is minimal, occasional, and part of a social ritual.

From a health perspective, this scenario is not even comparable to the daily, repetitive intake of cheap, chemically laden products that are designed for addiction. The premium cigar is, by its very nature, self-limiting. It cannot and does not play the same role in youth uptake, mass consumption, or respiratory disease.

This simple fact (that premium handmade cigars are associated with occasional enjoyment rather than daily addiction) is itself clear proof that they belong in a different category. They cannot reasonably be lumped together with cigarette packs or industrial cigarillos, which are engineered for frequent inhalation and chemical dependency. Premium cigars contain 100% pure tobacco, crafted for flavour and tradition, not for mass consumption. To regulate them as if they were the same as chemically treated, low-cost products is not only disproportionate, it is a denial of reality.

The real question is, what do you really want? Do you want young people to occasionally enjoy a premium handmade cigar (an expensive, self-limiting product made of 100% pure tobacco), or do you want them inhaling cheap, chemically treated products into their lungs every single day? The difference is evident.

Besides, in reality, premium handmade cigars are consumed almost exclusively by adults of a more mature age group (often 30 years and older).

So, why would regulators treat both as if they were the same? To equate one weekly luxury cigar with daily industrial smoking is not just disproportionate, it is absurd.

Conclusion

We hope and request that policymakers will understand the difference between cigarillos mass-produced by relatively few giants and hand-rolled premium cigars produced by hundreds of family firms. If regulation does not make this distinction, the result will not be better public health, but the destruction of culture, tradition, and livelihoods, all to the benefit of the very companies that created the youth-targeted problems in the first place.