Smoking Awareness Setback

Physician and other non-smoking groups lobbying for greater government efforts to alert smokers to the dangers of tobacco use recently criticized Health Canada for its tardiness in coming to a decision over larger graphic displays on tobacco products.  Those larger displays illustrating the gruesome health effects over time of tobacco use are now law in Canada. 

Other developed countries of the world had already made the change.  Nothing, however, changes the fact that Canada's was the first such initiative, persuading other countries to follow suit.

The health-information campaign has had its success, making inroads into peoples' consciousness that in continuing to smoke, or beginning to smoke and becoming entrapped in a cycle of dependence, has persuaded a great number of people to embrace smoking cessation.  But cigarette use is still on the upsurge in developing countries where more people, at earlier ages, begin smoking and start a life-time habit injurious to their health.

And, without doubt, there are some individuals who, despite knowing how injurious smoking can be to their future health and what can lie in store for them as a result of smoking, fail to be impressed by these efforts.  Theirs is the attitude, largely, that they will not be manipulated by government or anyone else.  That if they wish to use tobacco they will do so and damn the consequences.  The cost to society in providing health care to this demographic is enormous.

And now comes word that in the country that most exemplifies the virtues of free enterprise and the glories of the free marketplace, a U.S. appeals court has struck down a law requiring tobacco companies to comply with graphic health warnings.  This decision contradicts an earlier appeals court's ruling.  Making it possible that the U.S. Supreme Court will have to address the issue to settle this obvious legal dispute.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is held by this new ruling to have violated corporate speech rights.  The FDA argued the images of rotting teeth and diseased lungs depicted on the graphic warnings for consumers by edict of law is a true representation and needful to warn consumers, most particularly young people, about the risks inherent in smoking.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, roughly 45-million Americans smoke.  That cigarettes represent the leading cause of preventable death in the Unite States is beyond question.  The World Health Organization prediction is for 8 million people annually killed by 2030 through tobacco use impacting human health, if governments do not take the matter seriously enough to impede the inevitable from occurring.

In March, the U.S. Surgeon General warned use of tobacco products by youth has reached epidemic proportions; in the United States one in four high school seniors now smoke regularly.  Australia took a further initiative to limit smoking advertising, banning company logos on cigarette packs.  The European Union has taken note, and is considering a similar ban.

But in the United States five tobacco companies have challenged the FDA rules: Reynolds American Inc., Lorillarad Inc., Commonwealth Brands Inc. owned by Britain's Imperial Tobacco Group Plc, Liggett Group LLC, and Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Co. Inc.  The prodigious and expensive lobbying that the tobacco companies engage in speaks to their bottom line.

In its majority ruling the appeals court found that the labelling requirements from the FDA violated corporate speech rights, arguing:

"This case raises novel questions about the scope of the government's authority to force the manufacturer of a product to go beyond making purely factual and accurate commercial disclosures and undermine its own economic interest - in this case, by making 'every single pack of cigarettes in the country (a) mini billboard for the government's anti-smoking message", Judge Janice Rogers Brown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

The FDA, according to the reasoning producing the judgement "has not provided a shred of evidence" to indicate that the graphic labels would reduce smoking.