Diseased lungs. Corpses. Rotting teeth. A man smoking from a tracheotomy hole. These are some of the shocking images featured in the Food and Drug Administration’s recently unveiled series of cigarette package warnings. The FDA asserts that these graphic warnings will serve public health by terrifying smokers into quitting. Commissioner Margaret Hamburg boasts that “the FDA [is taking] a crucial step toward reducing the tremendous toll of illness and death caused by tobacco.” But will these labels work? Will the lurid imagery scare smokers into quitting?
Probably not.
First, the shock value of such warnings is likely to cause smokers to reject, not absorb, the message that smoking causes disease and premature death. Instead, they will tune out the message and do their best to ignore the images. Those in favor of the new labels insist that, now, tuning out such warnings will be difficult because the color images take up more than half the cigarette pack. However, when similar ads were introduced in Canada, smokers found them so disturbing that they purchased covers for their cigarette packs to block out the images — and then kept right on smoking.
Second, for habitual smokers, the decision to light up is not a rational, well-considered one: The nicotine in cigarettes is highly addictive, and smokers simply need that physical “hit.” In truth, the urge to have a smoke involves many behavioral and situational cues not at all addressed by the graphic warnings. These warnings will not address the power of that addiction; at best, they may prove a minor annoyance to the smoker.
Third, while shock value can, in some circumstances, help modify behavior, its impact is very short-lived. “The point of putting these pictures on is shock value — and [that] wears off very quickly,” notes Dr. Timothy Edgar, associate director of health communication at Emerson College.
If the federal government is going to be effective in discouraging cigarette smoking, it should focus on interventions that work, not those with no proven efficacy. For instance, instead of spending time on graphic warnings, the feds could help prevent tens of thousands of premature deaths by informing smokers that there are less harmful ways to use tobacco — ways that can be a valid step toward cessation. Specifically, smokeless tobacco products like snus, because they are not lit and inhaled, do not generate the products of combustion that greatly increase the risk of disease and death to cigarette smokers.
Yet the federal government continues to ignore such possibilities. Not only does the government not have a program to urge smokers to switch to smokeless products, they forbid the smokeless manufacturers to advertise the unambiguous truth: using smokeless products is far less hazardous than smoking cigarettes.
Cigarette smoking remains the leading cause of preventable death in America. We should be doing everything we can to help smokers to quit — and to prevent people from starting in the first place. But the efforts of our federal agencies to pursue such a goal are pathetically ineffective. The new series of gross-out warning labels is just another example.
— Dr. Elizabeth Whelan is the president of the New York–based American Council on Science and Health.
I'm an optimist, so I have to believe that smokers understand that breathing fire is bad for them. No amoun of advertising is going to keep the vast majority of them from smoking.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseOk, so I'm a former smoker (please don't tell my mom), and the reason I gave it up was because of my wife. Not my own health, not my wish to dance at my daughter's wedding, but my wife. Because the smell caused her to not want to be near me. So why not focus on educating spouses / partners / girlfriends & boyfriends on techniques to nudge their s/o's to change/
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIf everyone paid for his healthcare, then smokers would cost the general public nothing, and so then would be of no concern for the federal government. Problem solved.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseGood article. Problem here, as with so many other government behavior-control efforts (such as prison), is that the controllers are thinking of how to change their OWN behavior.
Leftists (ie bureaucrats) refuse to comprehend that people are different, and that the necessary carrots and sticks are thus different.
Advertisers don't make this mistake. They take the time to understand the needs and vulnerabilities of their target population in cold objective detail.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseExactly! Not everyone is sitting around biting their nails wondering how to extend their lives by just a few more years at all costs (either to themselves or preferably the public). This ad series says more about materialism and death panic and therefore the authors than it does about how to live life---the existential question that most well adjusted people spend time on.
I for one would like to see a spoof of these fun house images related to the unhealthy consequences of Islamic Jihad. Let your imagination run...
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"For instance, instead of spending time on graphic warnings, the feds could help prevent tens of thousands of premature deaths by informing smokers that there are less harmful ways to use tobacco — ways that can be a valid step toward cessation. Specifically, smokeless tobacco products like snus . . ."
Enter Elizabeth Whelan's reason for writing this article: shilling for the smokeless tobacco industry. The fact is, some people WILL be swayed by graphic warnings and those people will not be customers of the industry she's trying to collect money from.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI think, Dr. Whelan, that the campy "Reefer Madness"-style graphics the FDA is mandating is directed at non-smokers who are already or are yet to be under the sway of the social welfare state. Those graphics are definitely not targeted to existing smokers.
People like me, who have smoked heavily for 45 years and who have lived to see some never-smoking friends die young from excruciating causes (including lung cancer) have already made their own personal risk assessments. I suspect that the reason the social welfare folks are having such a tough time trying to reduce the "nicotine addict" population further over the last few years is that the remaining smokers, like me, have decided that the pleasures of smoking far outweigh the relative risks.
Are there greater risks? Yes. Are the risks what the social welfare state concocts them to be? Hell, no. Smoking increases the risk of death about as much as exposing oneself to the daily hazards of driving in rush-hour traffic (which, parenthetically, I DON'T enjoy). It is statistically evident that unemployed people are significantly less likely to die in autombile accidents than employed people. I suppose this is why the social welfare state is promoting work-free, as well as smoke-free, living.
I feel sure that the government is hoping that I will sicken and die sometime soon so that I reduce the population of "nicotine addicts" through attrition after paying into the "system" most of my life and benefiting them from Pigouvian taxtion to boot. If I do, I will be performing a public service--my Medicare checks and upcharges to meet MSA payments can go to help support one of the increasing numbers of MUCH more worthy Alzheimers patients who stayed healthy because they didn't smoke...
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseSmoking is a nasty, dirty habit. I know because I smoke. I cann assure you however, that some nasty pictures the gov't. is going to put on a pack of cigarettes is not going to get me to quit. It has come out that the pictures going on cigarettes are all photoshopped. That becomes propoganda. I am sick and tired of these efforts to demonize another group of people in this Country. I know what is most likely to kill me.
My question to the gov't. is this. If I and everyone else who smokes, decide to quit, what are you going to tax next? Will it be on fast food, sodas, cookies? Smokers currently pay billions of taxes that are just sucked up by the States and Feds. That money will have to come from somewhere.
We hear about how much money smokers cost their employers and the gov't. You should be encouraging us to smoke more so we die quicker. I have been smoking for 30 years. I have not had a sick day for more than 10 years. Over my entire working career I have probably taken less than 15-20 days off for any and all illness. My blood pressure and cholesterol are in normal ranges. I would wager that my smoking has cost my employer much less in productivity than the majority who are extremely obese.
This is just another example of our gov't. and their nanny-state mentality. Regulate another industry more and more. I will quit when I am good and ready. Unless they decide to put human lung tissue in my cigs, I'll take care of it myself.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI remember the studies of my youth in which tobacco companies more than paid their way in taxes on health benefits, if one considered the lower life expectancy of smokers significantly reduced the total governmental expenditures of social security.
Further, I see today that Arizona is having budget difficulty because of REDUCED SMOKING.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseA safe alternative is smokeless tobacco? What about the 28 cancer-causing carcinogens? Not to mention reproductive consequences. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services says that people who use smokeless tobacco products are more likely to become smokers.
Over 80 percent of new smokers are teens. Are they going to pick up a pack of cigarettes with these graphic warning labels and think they are cool to smoke? What if we could drop the teen tobacco use by 10 percent with these labels? Wouldn't that be worth it?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAll these warnings, wanting to show gross pics to show how evil smoking is really won't do much at reducing smokers. I have probably seen worse stuff on the internet that what they plan to put on the packs of ciggaretts, yet I still smoke, and so do others that I know of.
My grandfather smoked cigs since he was a youngun....and continuted for many many years. He ended up with emphazima (sp?), black lung, and invasive cancer. Oh and add COPD to the list as well as heart disease and high blood pressure. The last time I got to see him alive, he had a growth (cancer) the size of a baseball on the outside of his rib cage...He laughed about it and said it didnt hurt ( he was on high dose pain meds). He said they would not operate unless it bothered him, so it just continued to grow. But get this...it was NOT the smoking that killed him, nore any of the disease I wrote about here. WHen the results finally came in, many months after his death...It was the BREATHING TREATMENT the doctor ordered that killed him!!!! Here he was allerigic to the medication in the breathing treatments, and it went undetected due to thoes arround him at the time just 'wrote it off' and thought 'he didnt know what he was talking about' when he told them of his discomfort and issuees with the treatments. Since people did not belive what grampa was telling them, they did not document it. Because it was not documented, there is no way to bring a lawsuit over it. (Nice going hu?) This leads me to belive there is some information missing and probably misleading in the so called "facts". My grandfather could be one of the people that is listed as cigaretts killed him, but that would be false, and misleading. The truth of his death will be kept secret and hidden because it does not agree with the agenda. How many other deaths are written off this way for the sake of misleading the public about the accuracy of the 'research papers' on smoking and it's effects?
Which brings me to my grandfather, who also smoked for many many years. Doctors kept saying he had only months left to live but he kept proving them wrong. I think he lived about 30 years past his 'death date', lol. Doctors insited that he's not going to see his 104th birthday. Ooops they were wrong again. He even went to his birthday part that was hosted elsewhere! Two weeks later, we burried him. He did live long enough to enjoy that 104th party, just as he saId he would. His pack a day habbit may have caused his life to be that short, but how much longer after 104 years do we want to have?
I am sure there are other cases that just dont fit the mold of what I am supose to belive about smoking, although for some it is possibly very true. It is not true for everyone though. There were 2 of my classmates that did not get to see snow fly after high school graduation. Not smoking did NOT help them live a long happy life. Getting in a car at the wrong time, being in the wrong spot at the wrong time killed them in an auto accident. Why is it smoking is getting so much attention while the killer autos do NOT get such attention and why isnt their more focus on the RISKS of such transportation? My 22 yr old daugher has suffered great distress over the fact of more than 10 of her peers died in car realted accidents since she was a JR in high school, but NONE in her peer group had issues from smoking (yet). Does the goverment make more money from the automobiles than they do smokers? Do the companies that make them have more workers on their payrolls than for tobacco here in the usa? Is that a deciding factor on what to attack and what to leave be?
One of these days I will quit smoking, but my use of automobiles/city busses and the like will always be minimized as much as I possibly can.
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