By October 2012, all cigarette packs in the USA will show graphic images and stern warnings about the dangers of smoking, the Food and Drug Administration announced Wednesday.
Umm, cause they have nothing better to do? How about checking out the quality of drugs they are putting on the market to make sure they won’t cause cancer and stuff. After all, we already know cigarettes cause cancer. Spend your time telling us something we don't know!
You know the unspoken here, right? They are aiming at illiterates and kids who can’t read big words yet. How pathetic.
The possible pictures include women blowing smoke in children's faces, diseased lungs, a cancer-riddled mouth and a smoker puffing through a tracheotomy hole in his neck. They will cover half the space on packaging and will also be shown on all cigarette ads, FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said.
Well, great, there you go FDA, putting the cigarette pack graphic designers out of work. Who says the government’s not to blame for the increase in the unemployment rate?
"Some of the images are very, very powerful," Hamburg said. "That is the point."
Because, let me tell you, when I buy something that’s a vice, I’m thinking about the images contained on the package. Here’s a hint, if they put a picture of a 1,000 pound woman on a Hershey bar, I’ll probably still buy it. Because I know a single Hershey bar won’t do that to me. See, that’s the thing, the message is all wrong – all these things can potentially happen, and not if you buy just one pack. It’s a little obsessive. I mean, do they really think the people who buy cigarettes don’t know the risks involved?
The FDA has posted 36 possible pictures on the agency's website and will pick one to run with each of the nine warning statements the government will require on packaging and ads.
In a statement, Philip Morris, the largest U.S. tobacco company, said it plans to actively participate in the rulemaking and public comment process.
I should hope they have a say since it will affect their packaging.
The warnings on cigarette packs, such as "Cigarette Smoke Contains Carbon Monoxide," haven't been changed in 25 years.
Because no one reads them. Shoot, I bet most people couldn’t even tell you they were still there. I do remember when they first rolled out, they thought that was going to cause people to stop smoking. Ha, boy were they wrong.
"The American warning label is pitiful," says Gary Giovino, chairman of the University of Buffalo's Department of Community Health and Health Behavior. "It's one of the most anemic in the world."
Yeah, and? They think pictures of blowing smoke out a tracheotomy hole will all of the sudden make everything right in the world again?
Furthermore, there is a link to the 36 proposed pictures contained within the story, along with the warning that some images are graphic. Well, how graphic do we really want to be? We know kids will see their parents’ cigarettes lying around, or even carry them around to be helpful, do we really need them seeing these “graphic” images? Sure, they will at some point, but I don’t need my two-year-old asking me about a woman blowing smoke in kids’ faces.
Giovino, formerly an epidemiologist in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Office of Smoking and Health, called the new warnings "a step in the right direction." But, he says, they're "not going to undo all the damage that's been done by decades of marketing and deception."
Deception, perhaps. Marketing, no doubt. But the fact is, once people are hooked, they don’t care what’s on the package. I guarantee you no one has said, “Give me a pack of Marlboro Reds,” looked at the package, saw the warning and went, “Nevermind, just give me a pack of gum instead.”
The 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act limits what the FDA can do to reduce smoking rates, says John Banzhaf, executive director of Action on Smoking and Health, an anti-smoking group.
I don’t know, perhaps, ummm, raise the price to something astronomical so people can’t afford them? Outlaw tobacco? Replace it with tomacco? There are other options.
For the record, I don’t support outlawing tobacco – and I am not sure that jacking the prices is the right answer either, just because that can lead to other problems (like, you know, holding up a convenience store for a carton of cigarettes). Plus, if they were really expensive, they’d have to change their main form of currency in prison.
Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), could use her authority to go further, says Banzhaf, a law professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. For example, he says, Sebelius could require that smokers pay higher health insurance premiums and that all recipients of HHS funds ban smoking — both steps that are more likely to cut smoking rates than graphic warnings.
This is not a new thing. Shoot, even with the crappy insurance offered here at work, you get a $5 a pay period reduction in health insurance rates if you mark that you’re a non-smoker. We all know life insurance companies have long either denied, or charged astronomical rates, to smokers.
Oh, how about this novel idea - make things that help you quit smoking (like the patch, the gum, etc.) more affordable. That might help a lot of people. It sort of sucks when it costs less to buy cigarettes than what you need to quit them.
A lawsuit filed by several tobacco companies could block the new warnings. "We are challenging the legality of requiring larger and graphic warnings," David Howard, a spokesman for R.J. Reynolds, the country's second-largest tobacco company, said Wednesday.
I agree. It’s one thing to mandate that you have to have the crappy Surgeon General warning on the box somewhere, but to require a graphic label seems a bit intrusive to me. But you know, what do I know? I’m just an opinionated brat with a blog.
Ronald Milstein, Lorillard's senior vice president for legal and external affairs, said the lawsuit could lead to changes in the proposed warnings.
Good, I should hope so.
Geoffrey Fong, principal investigator of the International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Project, said it's important to change the warning labels regularly to keep smokers' attention. In 2000, Canada became the first country to add images to text warnings on cigarette packages, but it hasn't changed them since.
Fong says his research has found a "dramatic decline in label effectiveness in Canada" over the years.
But it’s Canada. You can’t go judging the effectiveness of something based on Canada.
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