A guy named Nathan Wilkinson writes a great piece on the new cigarette labels:
Today The FDA released the new pictures that must be on packages of cigarettes by October. These new pictures are meant to scare or change the habits of smokers.
The pictures include: a mouth with cancer, a dead body, and a comparison of healthy and smokers lungs. The rest can be seen here. Total there are nine new pictures giving the smokers the option to collect all of them.
I am glad, because I do not smoke and I lam looking forward in finding these pictures scatter in parking lots and outside buildings with my kids. Sure they are not in school yet, but thanks to the new standards I get to try to explain dead bodies, a tracheotomy hole, and rotten teeth to them.
Preschool kids should know what dead bodies and cancer looks like along side of their cartoons, but another great result comes from these images. These images only apply to cigarette smoke.
Sure you would think that these images would also be on smokeless tobacco and cigars, but there not. That must mean they are not as deadly and are better for you. The government would surely apply the same standards across the board and not demonize just one product over another.
In fact, I hope this trend catches on. I hope they put on every hamburger box a picture of blocked arteries. On TV’s I hope every commercial break they put a picture of a 700 pound couch potato to encourage you not sit around all day. I am praying for pictures of diseased livers on every bottle of beer and wine.
Ironically, what they’ve actually done here is give cigarette companies a way to make more money.Not all cigarette containers are created equal. Cigarettes in soft packs are prone to break. The nearby convenience store sells only soft packs of the brands that I smoke. So sometimes I will save the box from the previous and do a transfer. I have actually thought before that they could probably make some money in reusable boxes. A little bit larger than a regular box so you can fit all twenty in there, but not as expensive as the gold-plated ones that do exist. My mother, who rolled her own for a while, could probably also use them. But while they exist, they’re not widely available or they’re expensive. But they could produce them now and I would probably buy them regularly, because I’m simply not going to have these images on my box.
Cigarette smoking consists of lighting a fire and breathing in the smoke. It makes me cough. It makes my lungs hurt. It’s poison. I get it. Beyond which, there’s nothing they can put on the box that can compare to the sixty year old guy carrying an oxygen tank. If that doesn’t do it (and alas, it has not yet), nothing will. Until I’m ready.
That must mean they are not as deadly and are better for you.
But they aren’t as deadly.
And they don’t infect the surroundings the way smoke does.
Though I used to work with a guy who would chew and spit into a styrofoam coffee cup, and the entire office lived in fear that they would one day pick it up by mistake
Of what relevance is it that Wilt Chamberlain bedded 20,000 women? He at least had the good sense not to have converted to Islam. Finding 20,000 Muslim women to have sex with would require this challenge and feat to extend into the hereafter–make that, hereafters. What’s more, a full burqa from head to toe would not be provide a sufficient stimulus to rack in such astronomical numbers of conquest.
I just wonder what Father’s Day was like in the Chamberlain household.
Maybe he misspoke and really meant just 19,000. That I can live with. Proably best not to even contemplate “honor killings.”
Yeah, that bit was off-base.
So if permanent cigarette cases come back, especially classy-looking ones, do you think sexy cigarette holders will be far behind? We’ve all seen the great old pictures of FDR and who wouldn’t want to be like him, but did you know you can get double-barrelled or smoke tandem too? Fun for the whole family!
I quit smoking 3? years ago.
I don’t know that I’ve thought about my momma every day for the last three years… but I’ve thought about smoking every day.
I see the FDA as the latest terrorist organization. Since when is it ok to use taxpayer money to regulate advertising that shocks and awes tiny tots? As for myself, I will order a very pretty cigarette case. Hey entrepreneurs, there will be a huge market for it!
And the thing is, if you’re a kid that starts smoking (or even a college and/or military age ‘kid’) you never look at a cigarette pack when you start – because you always start by bumming individual cigs off of other people.
And in 2013, you will start by bumming off individual cigs that have a pack-cover.
Are you prepared to see a picture of a diseased liver on your favorite bottle of wine, pale ale or Captain Morgan? It is coming. How about a fat guy in a wheelchair with a quadruple bipass and oxygen mask on your bag of chips or hamburger? It is coming and in the works. Either we stand up NOW or NEVER before all freedom of choice is lost forever.
Anyone remember prohibition?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVuwREbGh3w
New trading cards! I read in the Washington Post that they are forged visuals http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/jun/21/hurt-no-ifs-ands-or-butts-fda-warning-photos-faked/?page=all#pagebreak . …
I can’t wait until they come with ones for rotten soles of rotten govt workers and politicians.
IT HAS TO END
Nevada just friday JUNE 17TH basically repealed their indoor smoking ban at least if you listen to tobacco control sources!
No doubt many more such state repeals will be forth comming.
I just find it so utterly a failure the anti-tobacco crusade. Like all movements their zest is real and their beliefs undeterred by actual science.
People who work together for the real common good, do so with the peoples rights left intact.
The second an agenda steps on people and criminalizes them they have set in motion their own movements failure. Without respecting the rights of the people a movement cannot stand!
Manipulation of science,the taking over of health depts,governmental health agencies,the stacking of politicians that favor your sides agenda…….Its anything but american and more describes a dictatorial roll rather than a constitutionally protected right to exist.
Public health and its advocates are fast becoming the most despised and hated group around the world as citizens find themselves criminalized for behavior that isnt a crime.
These ideals of such groups if left unchecked are the foundation stones of even more outlandish laws and less and less freedom for everyone.
A movement such as this can lead to world wars as we saw in the past century…….basic freedom for the basic man keeps the balance and prevents a growing hatred against such movements from spreading their ever growing hate into even bigger arenas of political life.
What drives anti-tobacco isnt just a hatred of smoking its much larger with tobacco just one of their targets,its larger than the obese people they wish to criminalize or the alcohol industry they wish to destroy……….
Their hatred goes much deeper its a hatred of american ideals,its a hatred of anything or anyone who stands in the way of their ideal world!
Its a hatred so vast and deep it has its roots in a socialistic facist way……….
The same as hitlers own party of national socialists……….while not a carbon copy of the nazis the policies are a carbon copy. The fear of such groups is the eugenics attitude such groups hold and when collected together they are the foundings of such political beliefs to surmise the national socialist movement………
Its to this building ideology that tobacco control and their eugenics beliefs must be stopped.
At this point in American public health history, nobody has any excuse for not knowing that cigarettes are bad for you. Everyone who smokes does so knowing it’s bad for them. Even new, young smokers start already knowing that it’s bad for them. The thing about new, young smokers is that (common to young people everywhere) they don’t care about the risks, from which they believe themselves to be immune. Every one of my patients who smokes listens with sheepish bemusement while I hector them about how bad it is for them, and I don’t kid myself that my earnest, heartfelt, personalized warnings to them make much difference in their decisions later that day. (Somewhat more heartening, many new parents have quit out of concern for the health of their babies, so it keeps me from sticking my head in an over.)
Will gross pictures of mouth cancers dissuade anyone who has otherwise decided to smoke? Nope. Correcting an ignorance that nobody has won’t make a lick of difference.
“my head in an oven, ” that is.
Ah, I thought you were using some sort of cricket metaphor.
You might even be thinking of Sylvia Plath.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t smoking in your twenties of thirties not really make a hell of a lot of a difference provided you actually do quit. Statistically speaking, quitting gets more and more difficult the longer one smokes, but, of course, this says nothing of the individual.
I’ve read that when you start can actually make a bigger difference than how long you’ve been smoking. On the other hand, both sets of data are tainted by the fact that people with certain personality types are more prone to addiction.
I’m hoping like hell the effects are mitigated by the age at which you start, since I started at 22 or so. I quit for about six months and actually got to the point that the notion of smoking seemed disgusting to me (again). But then… and now, I feel more addicted than ever.
Jaybird, when did you start?
I know the anti-smoking movement is evil and paternalistic and fascist and anti-capitalist and all that, but …
At my first job, lo these many years ago, if you shared an office with a smoker, then you spent your day in a smoke-filled room. Period.
After a year or so, an effort was made to pair smokers up. Now you’re surrounded by smoke only if you need to go talk to a smoker.
A bit after that, the company invested in ashtrays with fans in them., which cut down on ambient smoke to some extent.
Nowadays, of course, if you want to smoke, you go outside to do it, because your freedom to smoke is subordinate to other people’s freedom not to have to smell or inhale the result. Which is as it should be.
Of course, smoking was pushed out of the bar (where entry was entirely voluntary, and age-distinguishing) and onto the sidewalk (where it’s harder to avoid).
Your point is a valid one, though. I actually come from the “can’t we all find some way to get along?” camp. Several years ago, the answer would have been “No, because smokers demand the right to smoke in a neonatal intensive care unit if they so choose!” But, drunk off their successes, they’re reaching the point where smoking is legal, but there’s nowhere you can legally do it. Which, even leaving aside the questions of freedom and prohibition, is counterproductive.
I’ve been batting around an idea for a TLOOG guest post on this for about six months or so…
where did the comments go!