Editorial: New cigarette warning labels welcome

A troubling news story earlier this week reported that the long decline in the national smoking rate has stalled since 2005, when states started cutting back on their anti-smoking campaigns and smoking cessation programs due to budget deficits. But help, from the FDA, is on the way. On Wednesday the agency, which only gained regulatory control over this addictive, toxic but legal drug last year, proposed much tougher, graphic warning labels on cigarette packages. They’re welcome, and entirely justified.

Call it truth in advertising, the opposite of what the tobacco industry practiced all those years with its slick ads that showed happy, smiling people, strong, vigorous people, cowboys, athletes and test pilots, smoking. Compared to them, the boring, written government warnings on billboards and the written warning labels on the cigarette packages themselves didn’t stand a chance.

It was only when the billboards and public service announcements on TV started getting graphic, with people gagging on smoke and talking about their emphysema, tracheotomy and cancer treatment, that the smoking rate started dropping. (Other major factors were laws severely restricting where one could smoke, as well as hefty taxes on cigarettes.)

Well, those warning labels that the FDA wants to require on the top half of each cigarette pack, front and back, in vivid color, are very graphic. The agency has put out 36 different possibilities for study and public comment, including mothers blowing smoke into their babies’ faces, a heart attack victim, a cancer patient, a close-up of a mouth with rotted teeth and cankerous gums, and a corpse in the morgue. Not very subtle, but very real, and, one hopes, effective in stopping some of the 46 million adults who still smoke to quit, and young people from starting.

A ban would be justified for a product that does so much harm and has no beneficial uses, but probably wouldn’t work any better than Prohibition did. Short of that, we’re for anything that can deter smokers and would-be smokers, especially when it is truthful, as these warnings are.