In 2009 the FDA was given the right to regulate the marketing and labeling of tobacco products. While I’m not a smoker by any means, these new warning labels they are proposing are a bit over-the-top.

I hardly think that heavy smokers will be deterred from buying packs of cigarettes simply because they have scary images on them.

The smoking epidemic definitely needs to stop in America- lung cancer is at an all time high. Still, this scare-tactic that the FDA is imposing probably isn’t going to have a big effect on anyone who is smoking a pack a day. Showing pictures of STD’s doesn’t prevent kids from having sex and showing dead fetuses doesn’t prevent abortions.

The real problem is that smoking, for the most part, is still considered a “cool” thing to do. If the FDA really cared about the hundreds of thousands of people that die from cigarettes each year they’d work on educating the new generation of consumers in schools.