Cigarette pack warnings to get new look

WASHINGTON — The corpse is gone.

So are the grief-stricken woman, the man struggling to smoke despite a hole in his windpipe and the rotting teeth.

Nine years after the Food and Drug Administration first proposed graphic images as new warnings on cigarette packs but was thwarted by major tobacco companies in a successful court battle, the agency announced Thursday that it is finally issuing a new set of images.

“The 13 proposed warnings, which feature text statements accompanied by photo-realistic color images depicting some of the lesser-known health risks of cigarette smoking, stand to represent the most significant change to cigarette labels in 35 years,” the FDA said in a release.

They feature photos One of the new warnings aimed to inform smokers about lesser known risks of cigarettes involving lung and bladder cancers, diabetes, a chest incision scar from surgery, blackened lungs, a bulging tumor on a woman’s neck, an underweight infant and a man slumped on a bench who may be dealing with erectile dysfunction.

It was initially unclear whether the big tobacco companies would fight the latest proposals. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, which led the earlier court fight, said it was studying the FDA’S suggestions, which will not become final until next year.

“We firmly support public awareness of the harms of smoking cigarettes, but the manner in which those messages are delivered to the public cannot run afoul of the First Amendment protections that apply to all speakers, including cigarette manufacturers,” said Neassa Hollon, a spokeswoman for the company.

The FDA’S warnings are required under the Tobacco Control Act, which Congress passed in 2009.

The agency’s first choices, revealed in 2010, featured colorful — and gruesome — pictures to wrap around the top half of cigarette packages and also on 20% of the surface area of advertisements.

Public health advocates loved them, but tobacco companies fiercely objected. A group sued the FDA, and in 2012 convinced an appeals court that these specific graphic images violated its First Amendment rights of free speech.

The court mandated that the warnings be purely informational, not aimed at scaring smokers, nudging them to quit or imposing an ideology.

Although the rate of smoking declined from 21% in 2005 to 13.8% in 2018, there are still nearly 38 million smokers in the country, and it remains the nation’s leading preventable cause of death.

The United States was the first nation to require warnings on cigarettes, but they have not been updated since 1985. The National Academy of Medicine has called the current warnings “woefully deficient.”