Study shows effectiveness of testimonial warning labels on tobacco products
A new study by researchers at the Penn Tobacco Center of Regulatory Science (TCORS) at the Annenberg School for Communication found that warning labels featuring photos of real smokers who were harmed by their habit are more effective in getting smokers to quit than the text-only labels currently in use. At least 77 nations around the world use images as a part of their cigarette warning labels. The United States does not. In 2011, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was poised to roll out a series of pictorial warning labels for use on tobacco products as mandated by the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act (FSPTCA). However, a legal challenge by the tobacco industry led to t hese labels being rejected in large part because they were emotional rather than factual. These images showed things like fictional photographs of smokers and simulations of diseased body parts. In response, the FDA withdrew their original labels and began a research campaign to rethin...