Poll: Are you a smoker

Today, things are different, to the point where the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has now released a series of graphic, often disgusting warnings that will soon adorn every pack of cigarettes sold in this country. Under the new rules , tobacco companies have until September 2012 to redesign their packaging so that each pack features one of the nine hard-to-miss warnings, which are much more direct than what Americans are used to and will take up more space on each box—50 percent of the front and the back. The new warnings skip the mention of any surgeons general and get right to the point, with text such as, "WARNING: Smoking can kill you," and "WARNING: Cigarettes cause cancer."

The accompanying images—which include a cancerous lip, a man smoking through a hole in his neck, and a stitched-up corpse—are difficult to ignore. (According the Washington Post, the FDA considered but ultimately rejected even more morbid imagery of corpses in coffins and morgues.)

Canada paved the way for warning labels with pictures back in 2000, and since then, they have been implemented in more than 30 countries . (Brazil's warnings are especially gruesome .) Several studies and government surveys have found that warning labels that use pictures are more difficult to ignore and more effective in educating consumers about the risks of smoking and in motivating smokers to quit.

In the summer of 1957, Surgeon General Leroy E. Burney wrote a cautious, ultimately historic statement that marked the U.S. Public Health Service's first warning of the link between smoking and cancer. But the real bombshell came in 1964, when a commission organized by the Kennedy administration—after prodding from the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association and other groups—completed its review of more than 7,000 studies. The commission's official report laid out the grim findings. The very next year, after not-so-successfully battling the tobacco lobby, Congress passed a law requiring a timid warning on the side panels of cigarettes packs (but not in ads)...But it was not until the Comprehensive Smoking Education Act of 1984 that Congress mandated the Surgeon General's Warnings that are so ubiquitous today and will themselves seem so toothless in just a few years.

Over the past week, there's been a bunch of science stories about the dangers of smoking and second-hand smoke to babies and teens. I don't think this represents a bona-fide trend, but it is interesting all these reports came out so close together.

This study , conducted by Stanford University researchers, found that even small exposure to second-hand smoke damages the DNA in sperm cells, which could lead to reproductive difficulties. Surprisingly, the effects of heavy second-hand smoke inhalation could be just as bad as smoking itself to men's sperm. One fertility expert has recommended men stop smoking in the three months before trying to conceive.

Pregnant women, on the other hand, have been cautioned for some years not to smoke because it leads to premature or underweight babies. University College London found an even more compelling rationale: a new study that links birth defects like missing limbs, clubfoot, and cleft palate to maternal smoking. Another report , this one from Peking University in China, tied severe and fatal fetal conditions like spina bifida and anencephaly to second-hand smoke inhalation. Approximately 20% of women smoke during pregnancy, especially if they are poor or are teenagers.