Any smoker in the western world under the age of 75 can fairly be told: “You were warned.” The scientific evidence about what cigarettes do to the human body was not just unambiguous but widely known by the early 1950s. Yet a policymaking cliché holds that any adults who still smoke (20 per cent in the US) do so because they have not been educated. It was in the name of education that the US Food and Drug Administration rolled out its new cigarette packet warning labels this week. They will supplement the usual warnings about how smoking causes cancer, heart disease, etc with shocking photos. The FDA argues that 213,000 people will be moved to quit smoking after they see the new labels next year.

Even if those estimates turn out right, the new labels are a mistake. They reflect an ideology-driven habit of mind: if someone is not following your orders, it must be because you are not yelling loud enough. They are disrespectful, dehumanising and abusive of law-abiding citizens. They are the sign of a governing class that has lost its sense of proportion and its sense of accountability to the public.

Many countries have added graphics to their tobacco labels. They do so in different ways. Britain uses a range of catchy pictures. A shot of implausibly blackened teeth, for instance, accompanies its warnings about the “benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide” that cigarettes give off. Brazil, by contrast, uses sickening, slasher-film images. One shows a man whose bloody skull has been hacked into as if by an axe, to show that cigarettes increase the risk of stroke. Another shows a naked man stitched up after an autopsy and one has a baby’s corpse lying in a dirty pile of cigarettes. The US, alas, has chosen to go the Brazilian route. It has done its own version of the autopsy photo. It has added one of a man choking under a respirator and another of a man blowing smoke out of a tracheotomy hole.