The Burrill Report


The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is proposing significant changes to cigarette packaging and ads aimed at discouraging the use of the products. It is the first such proposed change in more than 25 years and signals a new reality for makers of tobacco products, which now fall under the jurisdiction of the FDA.

The agency posted a series of packaging designs on the web that place big warnings along with photographs of people suffering from cancer-related illness (available here). They range from toe-tagged feet in a morgue to a man exhaling smoke through a tracheotomy tube. The images, which will take up half a cigarette pack or 20 percent of a carton, are graphic and all carry one of nine warnings of specific health risks that come with lighting up.

Under 2009’s Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, cigarette packages and advertisements must carry more pointed health warnings with color images after September 12, 2012. The agency is seeking public comment on the images through January 9, 2011. A final set of images and the congressionally mandated health warnings will rotate on all cigarette packaging and in advertisements by fall 2012.

The United States is not the first to go this route. The New York Times notes that 39 countries already require graphic depictions of the effects of smoking on their packaging. The hope is to put a new push at getting people to quit and stop smoking. Despite all the public anti-smoking campaigns, the percentage of the population that smokes has leveled off at around 20 percent.

Not surprisingly, the tobacco industry is none too pleased by the proposed packaging. Anthony Hemsley, vice president of corporate and government affairs for Commonwealth Brands threatened a constitutional challenge and lambasted the agency for continuing to “ignore the very industry it is supposed to be regulating.”

“It is fundamentally wrong for the FDA to treat the tobacco industry differently from the other industries it regulates,” Hemsley said. “Instead of forming a relationship to develop reasonable goals, the FDA appears solely interested in listening to vociferous, anti- tobacco activists that have no concern for our adult consumers that purchase our legal products, or the viability or potential unintended consequences of what they are recommending.”

Richard D. Hurt, director of the Nicotine Dependence Center at the Mayo Clinic told the New York Times that higher taxes and tougher workplace restrictions on smoking were needed. “The evidence is that graphic labels do make a difference in enticing smokers to stop smoking,” he said.

If it works, perhaps the FDA will follow with new packages for Twinkees that feature fat covered hearts or diabetic amputees. The problem, though, remains the capacity of the human mind to ignore what it knows.


November 12, 2010
http://www.burrillreport.com/article-fda_gets_graphic_with_smokers.html