Tuesday, June 21, 2011

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.

4 comments:

North said...

I'm taking up smoking, just to be tough.

Josh Kruschke said...

Ya I bet these sale better than the old death cigarettes with the skull and crossbones.

I'm going to quit when I decided to quit.

Silly social engineers.

Fail

Josh

Julie said...

'What more can you do?"

Well, we're now moving to plain packaging here as the couple of years of gruesome pictures haven't worked.

Oh and they're not allowed to be displayed in places they're sold. They have to be behind plain, opaque doors with no advertising.

KurtP said...

Well- if you "really" wanted people to quit--you'd slap a(nother) $5/pack tax on them starting tomorrow.

Not a gradual thing, but an entire face slapping tax that would actually hurt.

But we all know that'll never happen, because the .GOV makes too much money by taxing smokers just enough.

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