Cigarette Packs Will Now Have Graphic Warning Labels

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) has decided to take a more graphic approach to combat cigarettes. Soon, nearly every pack of cigarettes will have pictures of corpses, diseased lungs, and cancer patients, according to the Huffington Post.

Tobacco use, which accounts for 443,000 deaths per year, has reduced over the last 40 years. But data shows that the numbers are leveling out, as an estimated 46 million adults, 20.6 percent, smoke cigarettes; 19.5 percent of U.S. high school students also smoke cigarettes.

This comes after a June 2009 law that gave the FDA authority to regulate tobacco; the law includes marketing and labeling guidelines, placing a ban on certain products, or limiting nicotine use.

FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said that the law will allow them to take a "crucial step toward reducing the tremendous toll of illness and death caused by tobacco use."

"The health consequences of smoking will be obvious every time someone picks up a pack of cigarettes," Hamburg said.

The FDA is pitching 36 labels, all up for public review. The final labels will be chosen in June, based on public comments, an 18,000-person study, and scientific data. Tobacco companies will then have 15 months to make the labels--which will take up half the pack. Warning labels must take up 20 percent of the advertisements.

"It acts as a very public billboard because you all of a sudden are reading something about lung cancer from that pack behind the cash register, whereas before you were just reading Marlboro," said David Hammond, a health behavior researcher at the University of Waterloo in Canada.