Health warnings on tobacco products are hard to miss. Unfortunately, the Food and Drug Administration has no idea if the state-mandated labels actually do anything to curb consumption.

Rather than resolve the doubts with science, regulators decided to double their bet in 2016, ordering cigar and pipe tobacco companies to include even larger warnings on their packaging and advertising. In other words, regulators figured that if their prevention strategy was flawed, maybe they could fix it by going bigger.