Gotta Collect Them All

Starting in 2012, packs of cigarettes sold in the United States will begin featuring pictures of tracheotomies, corpses, and women smoking while holding a baby.  This is done in an effort to wring a few more people into the ex-smoker bucket.

Smoking rates have dropped considerably over the past few decades, but the curve has flattened.  This is another effort by the government to try to get people to stop doing what they want with their own bodies in the name of "for your own good" public policy.

But let's face it.  If you live in the United States and don't know that consuming tobacco is bad for you, you're either a deaf-mute or you've been ignoring print media, television, billboards, and warnings on the cigarette packs themselves for over a generation.

Graphic pictures of diseased lungs and such may drop the smoking rate a few percentage points, but it won't be a sustained reduction, and after this it would appear that the FDA has shot its bolt.  Once you've raised taxes, stigmatized smoking, and put gross pictures on tobacco packaging, what more can you do?  Prohibition won't work.  Think crack addicts are violent?  Make it nigh unto impossible for a 3 pack a day smoker to get their fix and watch our cities burn.

What I see happening is a marginal decrease in the number of new smokers for a few years, and then the curve will either re-flatten or lose ground as the shock value wears off.  And I see a lot of smokers trying to collect one of each of these graphic packs.  Pokemon meets Marlboro.

This is the FDA version of gun control. It's what you do instead of something constructive.