Do Graphic Ads help your Quititude? I really want to know what the EX Community thinks! Thanks for your participation!
Graphic ads won't break psyche of many smokers
By: JOHN RAILEY | Winston-Salem Journal
When you're smoking, you cling to myths, including the one about somebody's relative who smoked every day and lived to be 90.
I can see through that psychological haze now, having quit smoking four years ago. The dangers, acknowledged even by the cigarette companies, are obvious. With the self-righteous zeal of the reformed, I'm for anything to get others to quit and to curb the secondhand smoke I'm still forced to inhale.
But I find it hard to get behind the FDA's push to mandate graphic images for cigarette packages and advertisements, including photos of sewn-up cadavers. That government intrusion on a legal product may well be unconstitutional, as one court decision on the matter seems to have said.
Just as important as the constitutional question is another one: Will the graphic labels even be effective? An FDA study found that although the labels may stir the smokers' emotions, the Journal's Richard Craver reported, the labels might not cause smokers to quit. That's not surprising.
Many of us took up smoking in the first place as a rebellious act in our teens. It wasn't rebellious at all, really, considering that most of our elders smoked and the cigarette industry was a backbone of our economy. But it felt rebellious, and the feeling stayed, especially as government taxes shot up the cost of our smokes and we smokers were segregated first to special rooms in our office buildings and homes, and finally kicked outside.
Four years after quitting, I still relish those outside jaunts with new friends I made and old friends I got to know better. We joked about being pariahs. Pariahs against the wind.
We'd vow to keep on smoking, no matter what the government threw at us. Smokers are still rebelling. As some local ones told Craver, they'd just buy cigarette cases to store their smokes in so they wouldn't have to look at the graphic images. I'd probably do the same thing if I was still smoking. Denial is a big part of the smoker's psyche, or it was at least for me.
As a smoker, I'd get the creeps when I visited friends and family in the hospital. I'd think about how smoking could land me there. But then I'd dismiss the thought, remembering those stories about the daily smokers who lived to be 90, forgetting what I knew about friends and family killed by cigarettes. I'd tell myself that my cigarette-roughened voice was cool, that even my smoker's hack had character. Smoking eased my nerves and kept me thin. I suspect I wasn't the only smoker sustained by such warped thinking.
Smokers may be weak in their inability to quit, but they're strong in their resistance to anti-smoking forces. My general-practice doctor finally got me to stop. After his warnings didn't get through to me during each annual physical, he finally hooked me up to a machine that measured my lung capacity. It said I had the capacity of a 96-year-old.
We need more efforts like that, more education in schools and churches, more chipping away in general at the smoking culture to change attitudes. If we can scare our children away from ever smoking, good.
But it's hard to see how government scare tactics leveled at adult smokers will do much good. The dangers touted by do-gooders are overrated, many of those rebels will say. Or at least that's what I'd say if I was still smoking.
