Since November 2010 I've been following here and here the effort of the Food and Drug Administration to require nine new and quite graphic warning labels on cigarette packs and advertisements. As I previously summarized, The graphic images include corpses with their chest sewed up, smokers with smoke coming out of a hole in their throat, disgusting-looking lungs that are yellow and diseased from smoking, a close-up of someone with mouth cancer, a suffering baby, and so on. If the purpose of the new warning labels is to convey the message that smoking is dangerous and gnarly, then mission accomplished. The FDA's campaign is the result of "The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act," which requires larger and more visible graphic health warnings on cigarette packages and ads. The law will go into effect beginning September 2012. In August 2011, however, four of the five largest U.S. tobacco companies filed a lawsuit against the federal government claiming that requiring the gnarly warnings to accompany their product will violate their free speech rights, cost millions of dollars to print, and require them to feature anti-smoking advocacy more prominently than their own brands. The tobacco companies' lawsuit asked the court to...

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