Your Stupidity Quotient equals the number of packs of cigarettes you smoke multiplied by how many times you read the Surgeon General’s Warning. -Mad Magazine
I’m all for getting people to stop smoking, but I tend to think that graphic cigarette warning labels will not have any more effect than the good old fashioned text cigarette warning label. Unless, of course, the FDA is concerned about Non-English speaking smokers or illiterate smokers.
The fact of the matter is that tobacco products should be a controlled substance, and like marijuana, should only be available for use by people who are already dying. Of course, I feel much the same way about booze and I am looking forward to the graphic warning labels for alcohol products. I’m all for the prohibition of cigarettes.
But cigarettes, like alcohol and guns, are part of that great American Myth of Freedom. It’s a free country, so Light ‘Em if You Got ‘Em.
Cigarette warning labels suffer from the same problem as airport screenings, they are attacking the problem from the wrong angle. Smokers know that smoking is bad for them and those around them-but it doesn’t stop them from smoking. Most of the smokers I know are women, all very nice people who are helping to keep sales of Febreze brisk. None of these women appear to be actively suicidal and I wouldn’t worry that they were going to drive off a cliff with me in the car. But they don’t mind lighting up around me. They need to smoke a cigarette once in a while.
So the people who are already addicted to nicotine are not going to look at a photo of throat cancer and say-well, I guess I better stop before it’s too late. It’s already too late.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s tobacco warning labels with their graphic images are still just proposed new cigarette warning labels. Tobacco companies may be required to have these on their advertisements and cigarette products by October 2012.
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