The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is mandating that cigarette packs display graphic warnings by October 2012, arguing that many other countries have achieved successes in deterring smoking with such advertisements.

Currently, there are 36 proposed pictures. They will be narrowed down to nine, which will eventually cover the front and back of half the pack.

Despite effort the FDA is putting into this, I don’t think it will be an effective initiative.

In some countries, there are big words on the pack that say "smoking kills" or any variation of that sort.

In Singapore, among a handful of other countries, cigarette cartons contain graphic warnings. I remember feeling surprised when purchasing my first pack of cigarettes in Singapore in 2007.

Most of the images weren’t too disturbing—nothing I haven’t seen in anti-smoking commercials here in the U.S.

There were pictures of gum cancer, lung cancer, and amputated fingers.

Yet one picture was so graphic that I literally stapled a piece of paper over the pack so that I didn’t have to look at it every time I reached for a cigarette.

It was a picture of a dead fetus.

Maybe my feeling was owed to being a woman. The picture affected me so much and I hope everyone gets at least a little squeamish when looking at a picture like that.

I am all for deterring people from smoking. Yet here I stand before you, still a smoker, even after seeing those graphic images.

The most they ever did is make me think twice before smoking, but I never quit.

Obviously, smokers know that smoking is bad for their health in a number of different ways. One would have to live in a cave for decades to not know the harmful effects.

Therefore, I’m not sure this FDA campaign would get many smokers to quit.

However, it may be effective in preventing people from starting to smoke.

Every day almost 4,000 teenagers try a cigarette for the first time and 1,000 of them become regular smokers, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

Almost 20 percent of American high school students are smokers, which is something that we should be worrying about.

Unfortunately, if you’re already a smoker, there is not much to get you stop smoking and fear definitely isn’t a lasting motivation.

Fear may be powerful for a short period of time, but people tend to forget that shock they first felt when they saw the images for the first time.

These pictures may scare smokers for a little bit, but after they see a few packs, they’ve seen them all, and it is so easy to get desensitized to the images.

The success stories of people quitting smoking that I have personally heard are mostly from smokers who quit for their kids or if someone in their immediate family has recently died from a smoking related problem.

Unless the reality of the dangers of smoking hit close to home, many smokers think that they are immune to negative consequences or that it couldn’t possibly happen to them.

I can say this with certainty because I know I am certainly guilty of thinking this way.

When the pictures do come into effect in 2012, it won’t necessarily be the actual warning that may convince me to quit. Rather, it may be facing my own hypocrisy of knowing better yet doing it anyway that will persuade me to stop smoking.

* Jess is a pseudonym because the author does not want to use their name.