FDA goes graphic in battle against smoking

The images are stark, visceral, even disgusting. And that's really the point.

Nearly a half-century after U.S. cigarette packs were emblazoned with their first, modest warning, "Caution: Cigarette Smoking May be Hazardous to Your Health," the Food and Drug Administration - at Congress' behest - is going graphic. It is requiring tobacco companies to print painful images, such as that of a man smoking through a hole in his throat or of a lip eroded by cancer and a mouthful of rotting teeth, right on their cigarette packs.

This is hardly the first attempt by the federal government to cut into the consumer base of America's tobacco industry, but it is certainly its most forceful.

To some critics, it raises basic questions about how far the government can go to try to suppress an industry it has declined to actually outlaw, with health messages plainly designed to scare away as many customers as possible.

"There's no question that the government has the right, on a neutral and factual basis, to impose labeling," said Dan Jaffe, executive vice president of the Association of National Advertisers.

"But these are not neutral - take a look at them. We don't believe that the government can turn people's labels or advertisements into billboards for the government's message."

Jaffe and other critics says that requiring cigarette-makers to print the graphic warnings violates the companies' First Amendment rights.

Public-health advocates counter that the federal government is simply fighting fire with fire - using on-the-pack messages to belatedly reinvigorate a public-health fight that has stalled since money dried up from 1998's massive multistate settlement with tobacco manufacturers.

"The problem is that the warning message for cigarettes hasn't changed in 25 years, while the industry has continued to evolve its advertising," said Dr. Pamela Ling, a marketing expert at the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California at San Francisco.

Nearly 47 million adult Americans smoke - about 21 percent of the adult population, a fraction that has slowly declined since tobacco's harmful effects were first publicly acknowledged.

But it is the trend among young people - the potential next generation of smokers - that health officials especially want to influence. And in that population, there are some worrisome trends.