No one — likely even most smokers — believe that smoking is good.
But a plan by the Food and Drug Administration that requires graphic warning labels to be displayed on all cigarette packaging and advertising in the United States beginning in the fall of 2012 goes too far in attempting to legislate behavior.
The move is the most dramatic change to cigarette packs since the Surgeon General's warning was added in 1965.
The plan requires the addition of nine graphic ads showing diseased ridden lungs, tracheotomy holes, babies in incubators, corpses with visible heart surgery incisions and people dying from smoking related illnesses.
Will the new requirement stop people from lighting up? That’s the hope. But certainly education about the health dangers of smoking and the impacts of second-hand smoke to nonsmokers has been ramped up since the 1965 warnings were added to packages.
As a result, the number of Americans who smoke has fallen significantly over the past 40 years. Forty-six million adults in the U.S., or 21 percent, smoke cigarettes, along with 20 percent of high school students, says government statistics on smoking, released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Again, no one who lives in the U.S. could have missed the facts that surround the use of tobacco. For example, tobacco use is the leading cause of premature and preventable death in the United States, responsible for 443,000 deaths each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and costs the economy nearly $200 billion every year in medical costs and lost productivity — clearly good reasons not to start smoking or to give up the habit if you already have it.
In an ideal world, no one would smoke, or for that matter drink alcohol to excess. But these are still legal adult activities.
And while our federal government is making laws intended to persuade people not to smoke, it is at the same time sending mixed messages about smoking by providing subsidies in the form of a “price support program” to tobacco farmers. According to some reports, tobacco farmers were paid more than $194 million in 2010. Why not use this money to help these farmers find a more appropriate agricultural crop?
Surely, these new graphic warnings will get some attention and they may make cigarettes less appealing to children, but again, education outside the cigarette packages and making tobacco farming less profitable may be a better response.
We wonder how much it cost taxpayers for the FDA to come up with the new graphic ad plan. Wouldn’t that money have been better spent to educate young people not to start and to help smokers quit?
