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March 1st, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda WEDNESDAY, Feb. 29 (HealthDay News) — A federal judge on
Wednesday blocked implementation of an FDA mandate that would have forced
tobacco companies to place graphic anti-smoking images on packages of
cigarettes.
The proposed requirement from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration,
which was set to kick in this September, would have emblazoned cigarette
packaging with images of people dying from smoking-related disease, mouth
and gum damage linked to smoking, and other gruesome portrayals.
But U.S. District Judge Richard Leon of the U.S. District Court in the
District of Columbia ruled on Wednesday that the FDA mandate violated the
Constitutional free speech amendment, the Associated Press
reported.
Back in November, Leon said it was likely that the tobacco industry
would succeed in a lawsuit to overturn the requirement. So, he temporarily
blocked the FDA initiative until the court case could be resolved, which
might take years, the news service said.
Leon called the FDA mandate a violation of tobacco companies’ right to
free speech.
The FDA has contended that the benefits to the public of highlighting
the dangers of smoking outweighed the tobacco industry’s free speech
rights. The agency did not immediately provide a comment on Leon’s ruling
Wednesday, the AP reported.
Leon said last fall that the nine graphic images, which were approved
by the FDA and due to start appearing this September, did more than just
convey facts about the health risks of smoking — they took an advocacy
stance, a key distinction in a free-speech case.
“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
in his 29-page opinion issued Nov. 7.
The nine proposed images, designed to fill the top half of all
cigarette packs, have stirred controversy since the concept first emerged
in 2009.
One image shows a man’s face and a lighted cigarette in his hand, with
smoke escaping from a hole in his neck — the result of a tracheotomy.
The caption reads “Cigarettes are addictive.” Another image shows a mother
holding a baby as smoke swirls about them, with the warning: “Tobacco
smoke can harm your children.”
A third image depicts a distraught woman with the caption: “Warning:
Smoking causes fatal lung disease in nonsmokers.”
A fourth picture shows a mouth with smoked-stained teeth and an open
sore on the lower lip. “Cigarettes cause cancer,” the caption reads.
The labels are a part of the requirements of the Family Smoking
Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, signed into law in 2009 by President
Barack Obama. For the first time, the law gave the FDA significant control
over tobacco products.
Smoking is the leading cause of early and preventable death in the
United States, resulting in some 443,000 fatalities each year, according
to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and costs almost
$200 billion every year in medical costs and lost productivity.
Over the last decade, countries as varied as Canada, Australia, Chile,
Brazil, Iran and Singapore, among others, have adopted graphic warnings on
tobacco products. Some are downright disturbing: in Brazil, cigarette
packages come with pictures of dead babies and a gangrened foot with
blackened toes.
More information
For more on the warning labels and to see the images, visit this FDA website.
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