Canadian Health Minister Dictates New Nicotine Pouch Restrictions

Canadian Health Minister Mark Holland will use new powers granted him this year to unilaterally ban the sale of flavored nicotine pouches previously approved by Health Canada as quit-smoking products. The minister’s edict will be published and take effect next week.

Holland will force Imperial Tobacco Canada to remove non-mint and -menthol flavors of Zonnic nicotine pouches from most Canadian retail outlets, and will allow their sales only behind pharmacy counters. 

Canada does not allow nicotine pouches to be sold as a consumer product, as they are in most countries. The Zonnic pouches were approved last year as a nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) product by regulator Health Canada after two years of study. Until now, they were regulated like other NRT products like nicotine gum and patches.  

"We want to stop this,” Holland told CTV News, “before it becomes the epidemic that we had with vaping, where we had all sorts of people who weren't smokers become addicted to vaping, and now that's having a devastating effect on our health system." Holland has made this claim before, but has never explained what the devastating effect is.

The health minister was given authority in June to overrule regulatory decisions made by Health Canada. The new powers, granted in a rider inserted in the federal budget bill, give the bureaucrat unprecedented authority to limit the sale, import and advertising of health products he believes are being used for other than their intended purpose and could cause harm.

“This is an absolute abuse of power,” an Imperial Tobacco Canada spokesperson said in a press release. “The Minister of Health is making smoking cessation products more difficult to buy for adults who smoke and who want to quit. It goes against all logic for a country that wants to reduce smoking rates to target products that actually help people quit. This unprecedented power grab takes a science and evidence-based approval process for therapeutic products and taints it with ideological considerations.”

The health minister—who previously worked at Heart & Stroke (formerly called the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada)—has engaged in wild rhetoric concerning nicotine pouches and vaping, both of which he says were designed by “evil” tobacco companies to lure children into lifelong nicotine addiction. He has also claimed that nicotine use is “deadly.”

"We never know what hole they'll slither out of next to try to attack our children,” Holland said recently.

Earlier this year, Holland began the process of banning most vape flavors, relaunching a Health Canada initiative that seemed to have been abandoned.