FDA Orders The Most Significant Change To Cigarette Labels in 35 Years

A bold new rule by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will begin requiring all cigarette packs and advertisements to include these warnings — and include them in a bright, colorful way where people will actually see them. They’re calling it the most significant change to warning labels in 35 years.

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“Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a final rule to require new health warnings on cigarette packages and in cigarette advertisements,” the FDA said in a statement. “The warnings feature textual statements with photo-realistic color images depicting some of the lesser-known, but serious health risks of cigarette smoking, including impact to fetal growth, cardiac disease, diabetes and more.”

There are 11 new health warnings in total, including the following:

• Tobacco smoke can harm your children
• Tobacco smoke causes fatal lung disease in nonsmokers
• Smoking causes head and neck cancer
• Smoking causes bladder cancer, which can lead to bloody urine
• Smoking during pregnancy stunts fetal growth
• Smoking can cause heart disease and strokes by clogging arteries
• Smoking causes COPD, a lung disease that can be fatal
• Smoking reduces blood flow, which can cause erectile dysfunction
• Smoking reduces blood flow to limbs, which can require amputation
• Smoking causes type 2 diabetes, which raises blood sugar
• Smoking causes cataracts, which can lead to blindness.

The new rules will go into effect on June 18 2021. The new warnings will be required to occupy the top 50% of the area of the front and rear panels of cigarette packages — and at least 20% of the area at the top of cigarette advertisements.

The warnings, which will be reminiscent of color images and warnings already seen on cigarette packs in the United Kingdom and Europe, are the first required change to cigarette packs and advertisements since 1984 — when the surgeon general’s warning was added, the FDA said.

The administration also noted that the current warnings on cigarette packs simply don’t do their intended job of deterring smoking.

“Research shows that the current warnings on cigarettes, which have not changed since 1984, have become virtually invisible to both smokers and nonsmokers, in part because of their small size, location and lack of an image,” Mitch Zeller, J.D., director of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products, said. “Additionally, research shows substantial gaps remain in the public's knowledge of the harms of cigarette smoking, and smokers have misinformation about cigarettes and their negative health effects.”

Hopefully, the boldness of the new warnings will have more of an effect. Even though smoking rates have gone steadily down over the past few decades, 80% of the lung cancers in the United States are still caused by smoking cigarettes.

If you’re currently looking for some motivation to quit — aside from the increased risk of diabetes, blindness and head and neck cancer — Dr. Joseph Friedberg, Head of Thoracic Surgery at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, told SurvivorNet in a previous interview that your lung health will begin to improve when you put down those cigarettes for good.

“You never return down all the way to the person who never smoked, as far as your risk of lung cancer, but it goes down with time,” Dr. Friedberg said. “So, if you’re smoking, stop. That decreases your chance of getting a lung cancer.”

Dr. Joseph Friedberg shares some info. about quitting smoking.

We’ve seen awareness campaigns work in the past. In 2017, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that they logged to lowest rate ever recorded of current cigarette smokers in the U.S. — 14%. Hopefully, this bold new move by the FDA will bring that number even lower.

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