According to a New York Times article published Monday, a federal judge blocked an attempt by the Food and Drug Administration to force tobacco companies to use graphic warning labels on their packaging. And while cheap cigarettes are bad, we’re glad this first-amendment issue ended the way it did.

Looking around campus, smokers are everywhere. And if our little corner of the world is representative of a larger whole, it means there are only more out there. Call us crazy, but when we see someone inhaling hazardous chemicals into their lungs, they’re not usually being forced to do so.

People smoke out of habit, knowing full well the possible consequences to their health. Health effects are written right there on discount Chesterfield cigarette packages in black and white, and that should be enough.

The FDA’s attempts to put staged photos of a corpse or a man breathing smoke out of a tracheotomy hole are just that –– staged, and therefore trying to influence public opinion. Frankly, that’s not the FDA’s job. As a government institution, they shouldn’t be stepping into an advocacy role, but instead should provide facts and figures.

That’s why we think Richard Leon, the judge who blocked the FDA’s attempts, did the right thing. Not only would the images be an encroachment on commercial free speech, but the new packaging would have been used to encourage smokers to quit from photographs that weren’t even technically real.

We’re big boys and girls, FDA. If someone wants to smoke a cigarette after a long day, that’s completely their prerogative. It’s between them and the surgeon general.

In recent days, Rep. Cameron Wheeler has fielded numerous phone calls from voters in his eastern Idaho district that took him a little off-guard. “They told me, ‘Vote for the Winston cigarette tax increase,’ ” said Wheeler, R-Ririe, of the callers’ message. “I told them, ‘There isn’t anything to vote for.’ ”

The people lighting up Wheeler’s House floor phone’s display panel were responding to full-page newspaper ads — in Boise, Idaho Falls, Nampa and Twin Falls last week — from a coalition of anti-smoking groups that have been pushing the proposed $1.25 per pack cigarette tax hike since before the 2011 session began in January.

The 31-member coalition, led by Campaign for Tobacco-free Kids, the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, argues raising the tax would discourage kids from starting smoking, but it also included this sweetener: It would raise about $50 million in tax revenue that would come in handy to fill budget holes as state tax revenue slumped yet again.

Their only problem is, Idaho lawmakers found other ways to fill what budget hole than raising taxes, including by cutting public education by $62 million and another $35 million Medicaid.

The crisis just wasn’t big enough to force conservative Republicans into their worst nightmare — raising taxes, regardless of their stripe.

“We don’t need it,” said House Majority Caucus Chairman Ken Roberts, R-Donnelly, of what ultimately killed the coalition’s effort. “The budget is balanced.”

Idaho’s tax is now 57 cents, the same as South Carolina, a big tobacco producer. Heidi Low, the American Cancer Society lobbyist, said she was “extremely disappointed” her group’s push to more than triple that never got off the ground — even though they’d won a marquee sponsor, Rep. Dennis Lake, chairman of the House Revenue and Taxation Committee.

But Lake, a Republican from Blackfoot, says he couldn’t muster enough support from his own panel to even win a bill introduction.

Rather than let the bill explode in ignominy, Lake instead decided to just quietly keep the measure in his drawer.

“It’s certainly different than the way I saw this at the beginning of the session,” Lake conceded. “I thought there’d be a clamor for it.”

The clamor just never materialized. Before the session, the budget gap was estimated at as much as $350 million for fiscal year 2012 starting July 1.

It turned out to be about $92 million — big, but just not the disaster some had feared.

For Democrats who have been fighting the Medicaid and education cuts, that’s still incentive enough to consider boosting the cheap cigarette tax. For instance, smoking-related illness results in about $82 million in costs to Medicaid, so revenue from a cigarette-tax hike could have gone to fill that hole and ease the cuts elsewhere.

“When the ramifications of the cuts to Medicaid begin to affect people’s daily lives, people are going to be very upset,” said Rep. Wendy Jaquet, a member of the Joint Finance-Appropriations budget writing committee. “We’ve done some damage. Big damage.”

From the beginning, those pushing the tax increase had an uphill battle.

The anti-tax group Americans for Tax Reform sent out a press release before the session — distributed by a Idaho tobacco-company lobbyist — urging lawmakers to just vote no.

And in one of the first votes of the 2011 session, the state House of Representatives killed a seemingly innocuous measure to raise fees by just $1.50 on those found guilty of violating Idaho laws — to send a loud-and-clear message that tax or fee increases wouldn’t be tolerated.

If lawmakers won’t fees on criminals, it’s a fair bet that they’ll be tough to convince to raise them on smokers, too.

With the Idaho Legislature likely to adjourn during the first week of April, the question still remains: Will a budget crisis resurface when they return to Boise next January. Early estimates indicate that even if tax revenue growth in fiscal year 2013 lives up to current state government estimates, Idaho will be as much as $100 million short of what it needs to balance its budget.

If that happens, lawmakers who this session spent hours of hearings on Medicaid listening to heart-wrenching stories of disabled residents and their families how the loss of services will hurt their quality of life may be unwilling to make such cuts again — and consequently, more likely to support the cigarette tax hike they deemed unnecessary this year.

Low, the head of the anti-smoking coalition, is hoping the economy rebounds. If it doesn’t, however, she’ll be there to remind lawmakers they have a choice.

“The issue is definitely not dead,” Low said. “We’ll be back. It’s good public health policy. We know that a bill like this would prevent 19 percent of youth from beginning to smoke.”

MOSCOW — One woman said children as young as 10 working in the fields developed red rashes on their stomachs and necks as they harvested tobacco for use in cigarettes made by Philip Morris.
Another migrant laborer working in the tobacco fields in Kazakhstan said a farmer confiscated her identification papers and withheld pay to force her to continue working despite dismal conditions.

Human Rights Watch, the group best known for documenting governmental abuse and war crimes, plans to release a report on Wednesday showing that child and forced labor is widespread on farms that supply a cigarette factory owned by Philip Morris International in Kazakhstan, in Central Asia.

While child labor should be condemned in any setting, the report said, employing children on tobacco farms is particularly hazardous because tobacco field laborers are exposed to high levels of nicotine while doing their jobs.

Only a tiny fraction of Philip Morris’s global tobacco purchases are made in the country, and no tobacco raised on the farms employing child labor went into cheap cigarettes sold outside of former Soviet countries. Philip Morris, after being provided with an advance copy of the report, said it agreed to sweeping changes in its purchasing policies in Kazakhstan.

“Philip Morris International is firmly opposed to child labor,” Peter Nixon, a spokesman, said in a telephone interview from the company’s office in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Although child labor is widespread in agriculture in Central Asia, Human Rights Watch said, the particularly harmful environment on the Kazakh tobacco farms warranted special attention. The report cited conditions it said were dangerous to children and adults alike. Lacking easy access to potable water, for example, laborers had resorted to drinking from irrigation channels contaminated with pesticides, the report said.

The group interviewed 68 tobacco farm employees in one district of Kazakhstan during the harvest last fall, identifying them only by their first names and initials.

All, including the children, were migrant laborers from neighboring Central Asian countries, mostly from impoverished Kyrgyzstan. The report also documented violations of basic farm safety rules, like laborers wearing open-toed shoes while working with sharp hoes.

Human Rights Watch researchers documented 72 instances of children working in the Kazakh tobacco fields, which employ about a thousand migrants each season.

Many are paid on a piecework basis, by the ton of harvested tobacco. The group said this was an inducement for parents to bring their children into the fields at harvest time. Even then, the report said, families made only a few hundred dollars for a half-year of farm work, after covering debts to farmers for board and travel.

“A company like Philip Morris certainly has the resources to put an end to these practices,” Jane Buchanan, a senior Human Rights Watch researcher and the author, said in an interview.

Mr. Nixon, the Philip Morris spokesman, said the company already had policies in place prohibiting purchases from farms that used child labor. Over the years, he said, this policy had reduced abusive practices at Kazakh tobacco farms — an assertion that Human Rights Watch said was supported in its interviews.

All the same, Mr. Nixon said, Philip Morris would step up its efforts to eliminate child labor. The company, he said, was “appreciative” of Human Rights Watch for drawing the continuing abuse to its attention.

But Ms. Buchanan said Philip Morris bore moral responsibility for the fate of child laborers in Kazakhstan, even though it was not their direct employer, citing precedents established by apparel and athletic shoe companies that over the last decade had demanded Asian suppliers prohibit child labor.

“Companies are supposed to have policies to recognize and rectify problems with human rights in their supply chain,” she said.

That many of the children worked alongside their migrant-laborer parents during the harvest, she said, did not diminish Philip Morris’s responsibility for their safety.