Product Dangers: Tobacco Industry Tries to Block Information

Philip Morris USA filed an appeal on May 6, 2020, with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to block the addition of new health warnings on tobacco products. This measure was recently validated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).[1]. This complaint follows a similar lawsuit filed last month by RJ Reynolds and other tobacco companies in the U.S. District Court of Texas. The plaintiffs and the Texas federal government jointly proposed a new timeline and requested to delay the implementation date of the graphic warnings by four months, from June 18, 2021 to October 16, 2021. There is no basis for this request for a delay in implementation, and the court should reject the request and any other industry efforts to delay the implementation deadline.

This practice of legal recourse has been very well studied by researchers who have shown how legal proceedings are part of a systematic strategy of contesting any measure likely to reduce tobacco consumption.

The information provided by health warnings, particularly in the form of images, is particularly important for informing not only smokers but also non-smokers. Indeed, health warnings are intended to raise consumer awareness of various risks that are often overlooked, or at least underestimated.[2]. For example :

• WARNING: Smoking causes bladder cancer, which can lead to bloody urine.
• WARNING: Smoking during pregnancy retards fetal growth.
• WARNING: Smoking causes type 2 diabetes, which raises blood sugar.
• WARNING: Smoking causes age-related macular degeneration, which can lead to blindness.

In doing so, such messages accompanied by information on quitting and its benefits support smokers who want to quit in their difficult process of giving up. In addition, these messages also contribute to prevention, particularly for young people and other targets sought after by cigarette manufacturers in order to break the glamorous and enviable norm of smoking. In this sense, health warnings undermine the advertising world of packaging.

These lawsuits by the tobacco industry continue their long history of trying to keep the public from knowing the truth about the deadly consequences of smoking. [3].

It has been more than a decade since Congress mandated that cigarette packages and advertisements carry graphic warnings after finding that current text warnings had become ineffective due to lack of message renewal and limited textual information. This request is widely supported by a large bipartisan majority in Congress as part of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act of 2009. Eleven years later, the tobacco industry is still trying to block its implementation.