Center for Tobacco Products News

Damien Campbell wanted to get back indoors quickly Sunday. The afternoon was chilly, a front had brought wind and rain to Winston-Salem and so he didn’t want to dawdle.

He was huddled under an awning outside Carlisle’s Pub with a couple of others. They’d come to watch the last day of the NFL regular season and ducked out during a commercial break to grab a cigarette.

Campbell, 32, seemed to be a bright, engaging guy. He’s also a smoker, so he was a logical choice to ask for an opinion about the graphic warning labels the Food and Drug Administration wants to plaster on cigarette packs.

So I showed him a few. Would these labels make you quit?

Photos of diseased lungs. A man whose voice box had been surgically removed, presumably due to cancer, with cigarette smoke pouring from the hole. A cadaver.

WARNING: Smoking can kill you. 1-800-QUIT-NOW.

“What a joke,” Campbell said after looking at the printouts. “No. I already know (cigarettes) aren’t vitamins. I know they’re not good for me.”

The survey says …

Campbell’s attitude matches almost exactly that of other smokers similarly surveyed over the past week or so as they gathered outside offices and buildings to indulge in a habit that’s already made them feel like enemies of the state.

The issue came up again because of a legal maneuver in a long tug-of-war between the FDA and the tobacco industry. The FDA proposed slapping a series of nine grisly labels on cigarettes, presumably because they might goose some smokers into quitting or cause impressionable youngsters to think twice about starting.

Five tobacco companies — including homegrown R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. and Greensboro’s Lorillard Inc. — responded the way you’d expect. They rolled out the lawyers.

This time, they’re claiming that forcing them to cover 20 percent of their packages with these labels violates free-speech rights guaranteed under the Constitution.

If large corporations can claim that throwing millions around in political campaigns is free speech — the courts have said so — then the tobacco companies will probably win this fight, too.

Anyhow, the new news is that 22 states — North Carolina not among them — filed paperwork saying, in essence, that they support the FDA’s attempt to use the gruesome labels and are willing to back the federal government in this lawsuit.

Ask the consumers

By the time this thing ends, the legal process likely will have cost millions in legal fees and court time. And thousands of smokers will have succumbed to cancer, lung or heart disease.

Here’s the thing, though. It’s not likely that the U.S. Court of Appeals, or the Supreme Court in the inevitable next step, or the lawyers on either side will have considered the real-world, practical effects espoused by folks such as young Mr. Campbell.

“Cigarettes are highly addictive, yes,” he said. “If the aim is to get people to quit, there are plenty of avenues for that. Another one is not going to make a difference.

“If it’s strictly about advertising, the cigarette companies had to get rid of things like Joe Camel. They can’t market to kids. They’re restricted in where they can advertise already. And really, if somebody wants to smoke, they’re going to smoke.”

Back inside, Campbell gestured at the beer he was holding and offered a comparison as food for thought.

“Will the government want to slap pictures of a liver rotted out by cirrhosis on these next? Where does it end?”