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In the attempt to stop smoking and spread awareness, the U.S. government decided to attempt to place graphic images on cigarettes packages.  Due to the long legal battle, however, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has abandoned the project and will now revise the warning labels without the images. The FDA has not announced when the new labels will be finished, but as of right now, the images of diseased lungs and rotten teeth will all be removed.

The project to get the graphic images on cigarettes packages started as a result of the 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act. This act was the first ever government project that gave the federal government the power to regulate the private industry of tobacco. The FDA had created nine labels, each one accompanied with a gruesome image of the consequences of smoking that would have been released last year. However, tobacco company, R.J Reynolds Tobacco Co., and several other large companies sued the government.

The tobacco companies argued that the government had already blocked their advertisements in magazines, billboards and television, and that the cigarette packaging was all they had left in terms of selling their products. In addition, they stated that the warnings the FDA wanted to implement were too extreme. The government retaliated and stated that the images portrayed the effects of smoking accurately and that the consumers must realize the threats of smoking, which causes 443,000 deaths a year.

The legal battle continued and the government chose not to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review their case when an appeals court ruled that the images violated the First Amendment of free speech. Some of the images included an infant being engulfed in the mother's smoke and a man smoking through his tracheotomy hole.

"In light of these circumstances, the Solicitor General has determined...not to seek Supreme Court review of the First Amendment issues at the present time," the attorney general, Eric Holder stated.

The FDA will now revise all of the labels and create ones that would fall under the Tobacco Control Act.