I took this photo at the Istanbul International Airport at the end of a recent family trip. I wanted to record a double-take moment. Not because they sell cigarettes in the duty free shops in Turkey. But that the display was so dominated by warnings of death and poisonous consequences.
Came back to the United States to discover that, once again, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration efforts to strengthen tobacco warning labels here have been shot down. Under a 2009 law, the agency was given the power to replace the 25-year-old small text warnings with larger and more graphic images. But last week the tobacco companies won yet another court battle with the FDA, effectively blocking those stronger public health messages.
It’s frustrating to see other countries do so much better on this front, moving so firmly to try to better protect their citizens. The FDA’s proposed labels are more graphic than the tidy text boxes we know so well. But they’re not nearly as grisly as labels already approved in countries like Australia. Still, as I’ve written before, no label really does justice to the misery of a tobacco-fueled death. I wrote about this more than a year ago, after my mother-in-law died of cancer. But given the tobacco companies success in stalling off that message, I’m going to tell it again here, just another reminder of why this really does matter.
Please continue reading at:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/08/smoking-warning-labels-tobacco-fda/