The federal Food and Drug Administration is hoping a picture is worth a thousand words when it comes to health warnings on cigarette packs.
The FDA has proposed new required health warnings on cigarette packs that carry stronger text warnings and graphic images showing the health consequences of smoking, a tactic already in place in more than 120 other countries.
It’s the right course of action in the ongoing battle against smoking-related health issues, and one that will surely be challenged in court by the tobacco industry. The FDA should continue the fight for stronger warnings.
The proposal includes a combination of 13 text warnings and images that would have to be implemented by cigarette manufacturers if adopted once the public comment period expires on Oct. 15. The text messages include warnings about risks such as diabetes, eye damage, and the effect of secondhand smoke on children. The images show things such as neck tumors and diseased lungs.
The text and images would have to take up at least half of the front and back of a cigarette pack, and at least 20 percent of the area of the top of cigarette advertisements.
The move to include graphic images has been a decade in the making, and one the tobacco industry successfully fought in 2011. At that time, federal judges ruled the warnings required by the FDA were unconstitutional under the First Amendment.
Since then, the FDA and health organizations supporting the warnings have developed a new approach that the agency hopes will withstand legal challenges. In 2011, the FDA argued that the warnings would reduce smoking; the tobacco industry countered that the agency had provided no evidence to support its claim.
This time, the FDA contends that the warnings are about educating consumers to the risks of smoking, rather than arguing that they would reduce smoking rates.
In addition, the FDA is proposing that the courts could decide which text warnings or graphic images are acceptable, rather than accepting or rejecting the entire package.
Although cigarette smoking has dropped dramatically in the last 50 years, there were still more than 34 million smokers in the United States in 2017, according to the American Lung Association. The proposed changes to require new text messages and graphic images will likely have little effect on current smokers, but they could influence younger people who have not yet tried cigarettes. The changes are worth pursuing and hopefully will be enacted.
First Published June 23, 2020, 4:00 a.m.
