Jonathan Ewing, Guest Columnist
Ideology: Independent | Writing from: Washington, DC
By the middle of next year, every legal pack of cigarettes you see will come with a photo of a corpse, an abusive mother, a dying cancer patient or any number of jarring labels required by law.
This landmark action by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is a result of President Obama’s Family Smoking Act, passed in 2009. The FDA joins more than 30 other health departments around the world in proposing graphic cigarette warning labels.
Some have called this action too drastic — “patronizing and unnecessary,” as the Denver Post put it — but a quick look at the statistics shows that this is a justifiable measure. Tobacco use kills off more than 400,000 people in the United States every year, and another 50,000 die of exposure to secondhand smoke. The World Health Organization, among others, calls this an epidemic, and so it should: tobacco use kills more people around the world every year than AIDS, war, car accidents, and homicide combined.
One of the FDA's proposed cigarette labels
Predictably, some Libertarians have already rushed to big tobacco’s aid, accusing FDA of an egregious overreach and abuse of power in forcing cigarettes to come with photos of corpses and people smoking out of holes in their necks. After all, if the government inserts itself between the consumer and his cigarettes, what’s next? Background checks for gun purchases? Oh, wait… that saves lives.
One argument is that it’s an all or nothing battle. Either ban cigarettes like we did asbestos, or get the government’s hands off of cigarettes entirely. We could have that conversation, except for the long line of politicians on big tobacco’s payroll. Speaker-to-be Boehner, infamous for his tobacco money handouts on the House floor, has taken over $200,000 from tobacco, paling in comparison to Richard Burr’s nearly-half-a-million-dollar tobacco chest. That kind of money damns public health.
But it’s not only the tobacco companies that are shelling out big bucks in order to finance tobacco use. The American taxpayer foots at least $100 billion annually in tobacco-caused healthcare costs, enough to pay for Obama’s universal healthcare plan. The ambitiously titled “Ending the Tobacco Epidemic” plan by the FDA hopes to significantly reduce that cost by bringing the smoking rate down from 20 to 12 percent by 2020.
Despite the millions spent on tobacco control programs by health departments around the country, CDC statistics show a decade-long stall in the decline of smoking rates. Instead of the government throwing more taxpayer money at programs to tell us, again, that smoking causes cancer, obscenely graphic warning labels point to the FDA’s new willingness to take more aggressive action against the tobacco epidemic, and to do so at less cost to the taxpayer.
Jonathan Ewing works for Action on Smoking Health, an anti-smoking organization. Views expressed are his own. He blogs at Framing TC.
The fact that you even brought up the idea of banning tobacco like asbestos shows total ignorance of the history of the prohibition and the of the “brilliance” of our current policy on marijuana (look at mexico for the results). You make it seem like smokers kill people. Actually, they just kil themselves. And they should have the individual right to do so. I fully agree with the need to ban smoking in public places to prevent second hand smoke but anything more is a gross invasion of liberty.
I completely and wholeheartedly agree with you, Paul.
The families of the 50,000 Americans who die every year of secondhand smoke might take exception with your assertion that smokers should have the individual right to kill themselves because it seems like their smoking is only hurting them.
But through their death, they aren’t hurting me. By banning smoking you are infringing on my — or the rest of 299 millions of Americans — who are not part of a family who suffered the loss of a smoker. And I know this will sounds insensitive, but if those famillies really loved their smokers, they would have made them quit as they probably knew that smoking kills. Or alternatively, through their unconditional love they would have made peace with the fact that their smoker loved one will eventually die of lung cancer and love them regardless and consider that the smoker died happy. And plus, killing one’s self, regardless if through smoking or not, is an individual right. Yes, if you kill yourself you are selfish and careless towards those who love you, but that life is yours, no one else owns your life.
I think we can both agree, Paul, that my freedom to swing my fist ends where your nose begins.
when your fist hits my nose, my freedom to kick your ass begins. This is a completely false analogy. You can only swing your fist (or your cigarette) only as long as I let you do that. If you’re the husband of a smoker you can try talking your spouse out of smoking, argue your spouse out of smoking, Lysistrata strikes, or worst case scenario divorce. Or you may pick up smoking yourself. You have the choice to do that.
A very interesting issue, Jonathan. Thanks for bringing it to light. A lot of Americans cannot read (or are simply visual thinkers) and a graphic image will move them more than words (especially tiny black and white words). This looks like a case of meeting people where they are.