Put me down as one who is a little sour on the idea that grotesque images on cigarette packs will cause people not to smoke. The Food and Drug Administration has just decreed morbid pictures, like one of some guy blowing smoke out of a tracheostomy hole in his neck, will appear on every package of cigarettes sold in the United States by fall of 2012.

The FDA released nine graphic and repulsive images that will serve as “new mini-billboards of prevention” and the bet here is they will only infuriate the 46 million American voters who enjoy a smoke and buy about 15 billion packs of cigarettes every year.

I agree with Bob Kohl, a 60-year-old in California, who said of the pictures, “They’re obnoxious. They are insulting. They are very specifically condescending, which irritates me. It’s nothing I haven’t seen before, and it’s going to be meaningless to the kids because their attitude is worse than mine.”

My attitude is that the government is foisting itself on the public in a way that it should not. Already cigarettes are heavily taxed, scorned, “sinful,” and said to “murder” 443,000 people every year but when the FDA insults and demeans 21 percent of the adults in this country – smokers – it has stepped over the line.

Yes, I smoke cigars. I enjoy them. I am careful where I do it, out of respect for others. But when we as a society allow our government to force a manufacturer to put a grisly photo, one of a cadaver after an autopsy, on a cigarette package we are losing our grip on the kind of people we want to be.

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