Gag me — smoking law restrictions on free speech should not stand

We said it. The New York Times said it.

So it must be true.

Congress and President Obama, reportedly still struggling himself to kick the habit, have given us a new law creating sweeping regulations of the tobacco industry. These include seriously questionable abridgements of the First Amendment rights of tobacco marketers.

On Monday an R-J editorial quoted the makers of Philip Morris cigarettes as saying, "We have expressed First Amendment reservations about certain provisions, including those that could restrict a manufacturer's ability to communicate truthful information.”

The law would forbid tobacco peddlers from claiming their goods are safer because of lower levels or tar and nicotine, something the government pressed for in the first place, presumably because they are safer.

The bill also prohibits tobacco products from being touted on billboards within 1,000 feet of schools and playgrounds to limit the exposure of children to the existence of one of this nation’s first profitable exports.

Also on Monday, the NYT quoted Daniel L. Jaffe, executive vice president of the Association of National Advertisers, as saying, “Anybody looking at this in a fair way would say the effort here is not just to protect kids, which is a substantial interest of the country, but to make it virtually impossible to communicate with anybody. We think this creates very serious problems for the First Amendment.”

Even the ACLU is weighting in on the side of the tobacco companies.

The Times quoted ACLU representative Michael Macleod-Ball: “The answer here is to provide countervailing messages. Discourage smoking, rather than restricting this form of speech that has not been shown to have a sufficiently close nexus with youth smoking.”

The answer is never a gag, but always more speech. A free people should be persuaded not hoodwinked through ignorance.

Remember when speech was free?