10 July 2026
By Breizh
On July 9, 2026, six former health ministers published a joint declaration calling on the Government to support and pass the bill establishing a “Tobacco-free Generation”, carried out by Gironde environmentalist MP Nicolas Thierry. A position that coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the Veil Act.
Claimed cross-party support
The signatories – Claude Evin, Roselyne Bachelot, Marisol Touraine, Agnès Buzyn, Aurélien Rousseau and Yannick Neuder – come from different governments and political sensitivities. Nicolas Thierry salutes a support that he describes as unprecedented, seeing it as a sign of a consensus built for half a century around the fight against smoking.
In their forum, the former ministers recall that the text is an extension of the law of July 9, 1976 carried by Simone Veil. They present the goal of a tobacco-free generation as the logical culmination of fifty years of public policies that have pushed back consumption in France. The MP now calls on the executive to quickly put the proposal on the agenda of the National Assembly.
A measure inspired by the British model
The approach echoes a recent proposal from Health Insurance, formulated in its annual report published in early July. The organization pleads to ban the sale of cigarettes to people born after 2009, on the model of the United Kingdom.
The United Kingdom was the first European country – and the second in the world after the Maldives – to vote for a life ban on the sale of tobacco to anyone born from January 1, 2009. Across the Channel, smokers themselves will not be sanctioned, but any merchant selling tobacco to a person born after 2008 will be exposed to a flat-rate fine of 200 pounds, or about 230 euros.
The Director General of Health Insurance, Thomas Fatôme, estimated that France was capable of doing the same, judging the hexagonal results mediocre despite price increases and health warnings already in place.
A logic of “preventive turn”
Beyond tobacco, Health Insurance calls for a preventive turning point in health policies, presented as the “battle of the decade”. The report advances other measures: Mandatory Nutri-Score on packaged products with mention of the ultra-processed character, wearing of helmets imposed on bicycles and on motorized moving vehicles for those over 12 years of age, or a large vaccination campaign against pneumococcus for those over 65 years of age, today very little covered.
The bill “Generation without tobacco” is now waiting to be registered on the parliamentary calendar to know its fate.
[cc] Article written by the editorial staff of breizh-info.com and reread and corrected (spelling, syntax) by artificial intelligence.