Kevin Riordan: FDA selective in its graphic warnings

Today is the perfect day to thank myself for not smoking.

Cigarettes are a dumb, dangerous, budget-busting habit that I truly loved for 25 years.

Although family and friends might argue otherwise, I'm an adult, and I was one when I tore open my first pack of Marlboros.

It was the 1980s; cigarette commercials had been off TV for a decade, and those preposterous "doctors recommend Camels" ads were long out of print.

I knew the risks but lit up anyway.

Two years and two months ago, I made another informed, grownup choice: I quit consuming this totally legal, heavily taxed, and profoundly addictive product.

I'm smoke-free at last, and I'm grateful.

Yet the purposely repulsive, even sinister, images the federal government wants to slap on every American pack turn me off.

The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act of 2009 gives the Food and Drug Adminstration extensive authority over cigarette packaging and advertising. By next June, warning labels will cover half of a pack's front and back sides and will be more emphatic and dramatic.

If not melodramatic: There's a Reefer Madness (or perhaps Pulp Fiction) quality to the flamboyant proposed graphics.

We see actors impersonating corpses, cancer patients, and clueless smokers (check out the lady exhaling in a baby's face). A cancerous mouth bleeds, and a man puffs away as smoke billows through the stoma of his tracheotomy (www.fda.gov/tobacco/).

Folks in the Mad Men era might well have been shocked, but today's media-savvy public may prove immune to this gory overkill. I certainly find it tough to take this little shop of smoking horrors seriously.

But the good people of the Food and Drug Administration aren't kidding, any more than the gloved ones over at the Transportation Safety Administration are putting us on as they pat us down.

My inner libertarian is tempted to see these "for your own good" initiatives as Nannies Gone Wild, little more than government-as-governess. And isn't there a disconnect here?

"Why don't they just stop the manufacturing of cigarettes?" asks Sanjay Zaveri, owner of Butts & Bets in Voorhees. "They have so much concern about cigarettes, but what about liquor?"

The man is onto something. Where, indeed, are the graphic warning labels for other lucrative legal products that, like cigarettes, can have deadly consequences?

The recent media madness about Four Loko, the canned booze-and-caffeine concoction popular on college campuses, suggests what's possible.

Shouldn't there be photos of drunken-driving accidents on six packs of regular brew? Images of diseased livers on vodka bottles?

When you think about it, all but certifiably vegan/organic/free-range/cage-free/fair-trade foods should display warnings, too.

The more sensational, the better.

Ice cream containers should carry photos of morbidly obese people with zombie teeth. Bags of chips ought to include CSI-like autopsy scenes.

Tuna, peanuts, eggs, and the infamously ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup - the possibilities for preachy packaging are as endless as they are exhilarating.

But no slick piece of marketing convinced me to stop smoking, and being penalized and ghettoized with other smokers didn't either.

The cost, the disdain - especially when directed at smoking outdoors in New Jersey - actually made me feel like part of a special, renegade community. (Believe me, catching an outside smoke with a fellow exile during a blizzard is a bonding experience.)

I finally quit because I simply got tired of the taste and the smell, tired of the carcinogens I was ingesting along with the nicotine I was hooked on.

My decision was personal, not political.

Look, we need an FDA (and a TSA - I mean, do you want that job? I sure don't).

But balance is hard to find when near-hysteria (see: Drudge) rules.

Not every TSA employee is a potential pervert any more than every airline passenger is a potential terrorist.

And no one who chooses to smoke should be forced to look at outtakes from The Walking Dead.

By law, the new labels must be in place by next June; the FDA is accepting public comment through Jan. 11.

My response?

No thanks.