FDA should not impose on consumer decisions 
On Tuesday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration revealed nine new labels to be placed on packs of cigarettes alongside the standard warning about lung cancer and how smoking can kill. Starting September this year, the FDA will require at least 50 percent of the box to be covered in these new labels accompanied with graphics.
The graphics are, well, graphic. They are also repulsive. One label shows a man lying on a hospital bed with the center of his chest stitched up. Another shows a picture of a rotted mouth, and another shows one of a real lung, black and yellow and enough to make me lose any appetite I may have had.
Smoking is obviously harmful, and there is nothing wrong with letting consumers know that, as they all should prior to purchasing cigarettes. However, there is a fine line between simply warning consumers and imposing views on them, and while the FDA may have good intentions in mind, it should carry out these intentions in a different way. It's not the FDA's job to prescribe a certain belief on consumers or wrench them away from purchasing something, especially when such measures could also severely affect a large industry in our economy. Its job is simply to educate.
What a consumer ultimately chooses to purchase is his or her individual decision, and if negative consequences are associated with it, that is also the individual's problem to endure. The FDA doesn't require pictures of clogged arteries to take up half of the front of a bag of potato chips, and it shouldn't require these images to take up half of a cigarette box either.