Kerry "Smokey" Hicks, owner of the Smokin' Fisherman in Clermont has on his counter a cigarette pack from Mexico, which shows the image of a dead baby lying on a bed of cigarette butts.
"I think it's stupid. How many different ways are they going to tell people cigarettes are bad for your health? It's foolish," Hicks said.
Nevertheless, the U.S. government is going to take cigarette warning labels a step farther by including a graphic photo of the negative health effects smoking causes.
The nine new images, which include a man with a tracheotomy smoking, a man with an oxygen mask and a sewn-up corpse, will be printed on the top half, both front and back of the packs. The images must appear on cigarette packs by the fall of 2012.
More than 40 countries use images similar to the ones that will be used in the U.S. to deter smoking.
Canada uses the image of a pregnant mother smoking, while Uruguay shows rotting teeth and gums.
Hicks said he does not expect the new cigarette packs to affect his business.
"I don't think it's going to stop anybody from smoking cigarettes, but with kids it's going to be ‘I got the dead baby, what one did you get'?" Hicks said.
Many local consumers said they feel the images are offensive and won't have the desired effect.
Heather Hayes is a mother and a nonsmoker. She says she feels the images could be traumatizing to a young child and could scare them away from picking up the habit in the future.
"But then again, I've got a little boy, he might think it's cool," Hayes said.
Warning labels first appeared on cigarette packs in the U.S. in the 1960s. In the mid-1980s cigarette packs began using the small box of text currently in use. The changes to the new, more graphic warning labels were mandated in 2009 in a law that gave the federal government authority to regulate tobacco.
"The surgeon general made everyone aware, because everyone was smoking in America 50 years ago. Everybody knows what smoking does, we don't need these brutal images to show us," Chase Cosgrove of Gainesville said.
Cosgrove says the images won't deter him from going to the store and buying a pack of cigarettes. He said the only thing the images will do is upset him.
"I want to quit on my own eventually, I do know the health risks involved, but I don't need a picture. It's kind of a slap in the face," Cosgrove said.
Top tobacco companies, such as R.J. Reynolds, Lorillard Inc. and Commonwealth Brands Inc. are involved in a federal lawsuit that in part deals with the legality of the new labels. In comments to the Food and Drug Administration, the companies compared the new labels to that of images frequently used by anti-abortion protesters and animal-rights activists.
Katie Laney, who has recently quit smoking, said it seems to her that the new images are infringing on the rights of tobacco companies.
"To attack just cigarettes, I think alcohol should be the same way. I think we have an agenda against cigarettes and I don't understand why. It's just a cigarette," Laney said.
Nonsmoker, Shannon Martin, Gainesville, said she feels optimistic about the new labels. She thinks that it will keep kids from picking up a cigarette in the first place. She said that's why the cigarette companies are "freaking out."
"I think it will probably change things, People that have never smoked before probably never will, I don't know if it will change things for people who already do," Martin said.
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