The head honchos at Big Tobacco recently filed suit in the U.S. District Court of Washington, D.C., against — interestingly enough — the federal government.
The plaintiffs, led by J.R. Reynolds Tobacco Company, allege that the government’s newly revealed, mandatory, graphic (read: grotesque) warning labels on cigarette packages — one of the extensive regulating powers granted the Food and Drug Administration by the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act of 2009 — infringe upon their constitutional rights.
I know what you’re saying — it’s a patently open-and-shut case, more smokescreen litigation, mere smoke-and-mirrors politics. You’re right. Big Tobacco is blowing smoke, for all intents and purposes.
But I’m breathing it — I’m with the plaintiffs.
I do buy what Big Tobacco’s selling. No — really, I do. Cartons of it. I don’t smoke like a chimney. I smoke like a burning pile of tires. I’ve smoked more than the Orient Express. I’ve ashed more than Mount Vesuvius.
As a matter of fact, comedian Bill Hicks routinely joked that he wouldn’t just go through two packs of cigarettes each day — he’d go through two lighters. I’m at three — no joke.
Incidentally, Hicks is dead. However, he didn’t die from the adverse effects of cigarette smoking. You know, the ones that deter me — and the approximately 2,200 new smokers every day, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — from lighting up.
But if you don’t know — if, like many smokers, you haven’t yet deduced that cigarette smoking can kill you — you’re in luck.
“With these new warnings,” Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius clarified, decisively clearing the acrid, smoky air that has choked the American public for far too long, “every person who picks up a pack of cigarettes is going to know exactly what risk they’re You.”
For me, that’s frank, powerful and honest.
But not for the government, which asserts that cigarette packages ought to exhibit a graphic image of the effects of smoking, that warning labels ought to cover 50 percent of the packaging and that they ought to prominently display the smoking cessation telephone number, 1-800-QUIT-NOW, which “will allow it to be seen at the time it is most relevant to smokers, increasing the likelihood that smokers who want to quit will be
The Philibuster: Big Tobacco sues FDA, smoking warning labels absurd
August 31, 2011