Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Court Strikes Graphic Cigarette Labels
I abhor smoking but it is also clear that coerced speech is not free speech
A federal appeals court on Friday struck down requirements for large graphic warning labels on cigarette packages, saying the government didn't provide evidence that the labels would bring down smoking rates.
The U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 decision, said federal regulators fell short of meeting constitutional requirements for justifying the labeling rules. "The First Amendment requires the government not only to state a substantial interest justifying a regulation on commercial speech, but also to show that its regulation directly advances that goal," Judge Janice Rogers Brown wrote in the majority opinion.
The Food and Drug Administration "failed to present any data—much less the substantial evidence...showing that enacting their proposed graphic warnings will accomplish the agency's stated objective of reducing smoking rates," she added.
"This is a major victory," said Floyd Abrams, an attorney at Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP who represented Lorillard Inc., LO +0.27% one of the tobacco companies involved in the case. "It's a significant First Amendment ruling."
Source
The FDA may have lost this one but beware of the politicians. A similar regulation has just been passed into law by Australia's Leftist Federal government.
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8 comments:
The great mistake most people make about this tobacco argument is, that it's about smoking. It's not. It's about your right to make your own free choices.
Those on the Left, those same people who have infected our country and our society with political correctness, will fight to the death to protect a woman's right to make a free choice, (abortion) but will also fight just as hard to keep anyone from making that same free choice when it involves something "they have deemed" as unacceptable.
The tobacco-Nazi's have demonized a legal product simply because they disapprove of it. That should infuriate every freedom-loving American, whether you choose to use tobacco products or not.
Yeah, who pays the costs for the medical and social consequences for self-inflicted drug habits. Yes, society at large.
They can smoke all they want as long as they don't blow it in my face and ruin a dining experience.
If they want the right to smoke in public, then I have the right to fart real stinky ones in public.
You probably already do that anyway 4:50 AM.
"The First Amendment requires the government not only to state a substantial interest justifying a regulation on commercial speech, but also to show that its regulation directly advances that goal"
Strange, I have read the first amendment and cannot find the above instructions anywhere in it.
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"If they want the right to smoke in public, then I have the right to fart real stinky ones in public."
I have little doubt you have already exercised that right, no?
The whole case by the government in reference to tobacco is.inconsistent. The FDA bans anything that that there is the slimmest of a chance of.causing cancer, yet tobacco which has been proved to cause cancer, heart disease, emphysema, yada yada yada, they do nothing about. Then the govt tells the tobacco companies that it is.their responsibility to warn the public. Hey, isn't that the FDAs job? This is the same outfit that claimed CO2, a normal gas present in the atmosphere, a dangerous "greenhouse gas" so they could regulate it.
Actually, Australia has had large warning labels on cigarette packaging for some time.
The 'recent' law is actually for plain packaging of cigarette packs - so that the colours, designs and branding are all eliminated and all you have is a plain box with a standard font name on it.
"You probably already do that anyway"
Only in church.
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