The Food and Drug Administration is backing down from its controversial cigarette warning labels that landed it in court on First Amendment grounds, according to an Associated Press report.
Instead of fighting in court for the nine graphically scary pictures of blackened lungs and corpses, the FDA will try a different approach, according to a letter from Attorney General Eric Holder obtained by the AP. The government will also not seek a Supreme Court review of the case.
Since the labels were proposed two years ago to get people to quit smoking, the nation’s largest tobacco companies, including R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. and Lorillard Tobacco, managed to halt implementation of the warning labels in the lower courts.
Advertisers sided with the tobacco companies and filed a friend of the court brief with the Supreme Court to hear the case to resolve rulings from two lower courts.
Advertisers argued the labels weren’t factual, and were nothing less than government propaganda turning cigarette packages into mini-billboards that took up more than half of the space on the package.
In a statement, the FDA said it would conduct research “to support a new rulemaking consistent with the Tobacco Control Act.”
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