U.S. District Judge rejects Cigarette Package Guidelines



The U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington has blocked the federal requirement, which would have compelled the U.S. tobacco companies to change their cigarette packaging this year. The federal request favours putting of large graphic images on cigarette packages to encourage smokers to quit smoking.

The judge ruled that the images to be put on cigarette pack as mandated by the federal include a picture of diseased lungs and a sewn-up corpse of a smoker, which violates the free speech amendment to the Constitution.

Prior to this, Judge Richard Leon had temporarily blocked the requirement in November stating that it was likely cigarette makers will succeed in a lawsuit, which could take years to resolve. The government has already appealed to that decision.

The constitutionality of the labels had been questioned by some of the giant U.S. tobacco companies like R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. and Lorillard Tobacco Co. saying “The warnings don’t simply convey facts to inform people’s decision whether to smoke but instead force the cigarette makers to display government anti-smoking advocacy more prominently than their own branding.” They also pointed that changing the cigarette packaging will cost them millions of dollars.

However, the Food and Drug Administration has said that the public interest has more value than the companies’ free speech rights. So, conveying the hazards of smoking in public interest outweighs the free speech rights of the tobacco companies. On Wednesday, Leon in his ruling wrote that the graphic images “were neither designed to protect the consumer from confusion or deception, nor to increase consumer awareness of smoking risks; rather, they were crafted to evoke a strong emotional response calculated to provoke the viewer to quit or never start smoking.”