We applaud Monday’s choice of U.S. District Judge Richard Leon blocking the federal mandate to require tobacco companies to put images of dead and diseased smokers on cigarette packaging.
Ruling that it is likely the companies would win a lawsuit claiming the placement of such images violate free speech, Leon chose to stop the requirement until the issue is resolved.
The nine images approved by the Food and Drug Administration in June go beyond the conveying the facts and into advocacy, Leon said.
“it is abundantly clear from viewing these images that the emotional response they were crafted to induce is calculated to provoke the viewer to quit, or never to start smoking — an objective wholly apart from disseminating purely factual and uncontroversial information,” Leon wrote.
The size of the images, covering the top half of cigarette packages, amounted to a mini-billboard for the agency’s obvious “anti-smoking agenda,” he wrote.
Isn’t this just a way for the FDA to justify keeping a well-paid marketing staff, or more likely, paying a high powered marketing firm, on our dime?
People should be allowed to make decisions about their own health, especially in a country where the medically insured pay through the nose to make sure they can afford trips to the doctor. do automakers need to put pictures on the sides of cars that show pedestrians squashed in the streets? or is the chance of injury the reason we are supposed to carry insurance?
What is ludicrous is that the federal government will probably still spend money to defend its right to place the sickening pictures.
People do not need to be beaten over the head with messages that are by now common sense — particularly at the cost of tax dollars. (ke)