In the first major change to cigarette packaging in a quarter-century, the Food and Drug Administration said Wednesday it would require graphic warning labels that cover half a package's front and rear and the top 20% of all cigarette ads.
The labels will feature either drawings or photos illustrating graphically the dangers associated with smoking and will be accompanied by text stating that smoking is addictive or that it kills. The pictures feature such things as a diseased lung, a corpse and a man smoking a cigarette through a tracheotomy tube. They are not quite as grim as some used in other countries, but regulators hope they will be sufficiently frightening to keep young people from beginning to smoke and to strengthen the will of those who are attempting to quit.
"We want to make sure every person who picks up a pack of cigarettes knows exactly what the risk is they are taking," Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said at a news conference.
Current regulations require only a written warning on the edge of the cigarette pack and a similar small warning at the bottom of ads.
"These are great! I am pleasantly shocked that HHS is doing this," said Stanton A. Glantz, a tobacco control expert at UC San Francisco, echoing the response of most observers. "There is no question but that strong graphic warning labels work" -- and that, in particular, they influence children, he added.
"Right now we have the weakest warning labels in the world," Glantz said. "Now we will be right up there tied for the strongest."
But John F. Banzhaf III, a professor of public interest law at George Washington University and executive director of Action on Smoking and Health, said he was "quite disappointed" in the action. "Of all the things that they could do, HHS has done nothing more than exactly what Congress told them to do, and not one iota more," he said.
Banzhaf also noted that Canada has had strong package warnings since 2000, and that "other jurisdictions have stronger warnings, more graphic pictures."
The FDA is looking at 36 different potential labels, which can be viewed at www.fda.gov/cigarettewarnings. The agency will select nine of them by June 22, and cigarette manufacturers must begin putting them on packages and advertising by Sept. 22. By Oct. 22, manufacturers will no longer be able to distribute cigarettes that do not bear the new warnings.
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