Do you get a feeling of relief whenever you see an anti-smoking advertisement directed toward teenagers? If you do you may want to sit down. Now there is a freshly published study out of Australia that concludes the following:
Exposure to tobacco company youth-targeted smoking prevention advertising generally had no beneficial outcomes for youths. Exposure to tobacco company parent-targeted advertising may have harmful effects on youth, especially among youths in grades 10 and 12.
It seems that anti-smoking ads aimed toward parents, such as the "Talk. They'll Listen." campaign only serve to make teens more aware of the allure of smoking, as shown by the researchers' own data:
Among youths in grades 10 and 12, during the 4 months leading up to survey administration, each additional viewing of a tobacco company parent-targeted advertisement was, on average, associated with lower perceived harm of smoking (odds ratio [OR]=0.93; confidence interval [CI]=0.88, 0.98), stronger approval of smoking (OR=1.11; CI=1.03,1.20), stronger intentions to smoke in the future (OR=1.12; CI=1.04,1.21), and greater likelihood of having smoked in the past 30 days (OR=1.12; CI=1.04,1.19).
This phenomenom of teenagers becoming more likely to smoke after being exposed to anti-smoking messages is not only disturbing, it is ridiculous, mainly because the geniuses in charge of creating these deterrent ads are, as the great Moe Howard would say, a bunch of lamebrains. If I was in charge I would require all cigarette packs to have the following message printed on them:
I WANT TO TURN UGLY AND DIE A MISERABLE DEATH
Or perhaps teens should be inundated with posters showing some of the consequences of smoking, like this one, or this one.
Then again, since teens are supposedly stubborn and resistant to authority, why don't we yell at them to start smoking and keep smoking? "Goddammit I told you to smoke, now either you get in there and light up or you will lose the car for a week!"
Could this be any worse than the obfuscatory twaddle coming from companies that make the same product they are supposed to be discouraging their customers from buying?
Let's all pledge to take the thrill and mystique out of smoking a ciggie - maybe it will prevent some kid from taking that first step down the ghastly path toward ruin, if not an untimely death.
- Log in to post comments
About your suggestion for messages on cigarette packets in South Australia all packs are now required to have images of the effects of smoking. The mouth cancer and gangrene images are particularly disturbing.
A friend who visited India last year rptd that the cigarette packs there have graphic/gruesome msgs/pictures also. Remember, tho, that many teens believe they are immortal...
As one who is undergoing chemo for lung cancer and has never smoked, I think if I see another antismoking ad I'm going to throw a hammer through the TV.
My dad, a never smoker like the last poster, died of lung cancer in September. I don't like the perception that lung cancer is only a smoker's disease, either. However, since Dad's death my feelings have begun to change. I don't know why my dad got lung cancer, so I don't know how to fight against the cause. I do know that smoking will create more lung cancer patients, and I want to spare every person possible from the suffering my dad endured. The cause of the lung cancer doesn't matter; I want to fight it on every possible front. Thus, I support antismoking efforts.
But I've got to say that Dr. H's proposed message, "I want to turn ugly and die a miserable death," stings me a little right now. I don't like to think of what happened to my dad in those harsh terms, although I guess they're the truth. I would imagine our last poster doesn't exactly feel encouraged by that, either. We nonsmokers can be awfully mean and smug toward smokers, and it doesn't seem to be making them quit. I wish we could find a way to make a more positive approach work.
I remember some years back I saw a news program that showed how in one town teenagers themselves made commercials specifically for teens. Apparently these commercials were considerably more effective than those from tabacco companies (not that it is much of a challenge), but tabacco companies protested and the commercials were pulled off the air. It was, I think, on 60 minutes or one other news program, I don't remember which one it was a few years back. Maybe somebody saw it.
Given that teens think they are immortal and tend not to think more than 5 years ahead, I think that including less serious but more immediate harms of smoking as well as showing the habit itself as repulsive may make more of an impact. Teenagers that don't worry about cancer some years later still worry about looks and sex. So the effect of smoking on either in the near future may have more of an impact.
That reverse psychology stuff does seem to work, although it's definitely not foolproof. In the days when I used to get to Mom & Dad's home more frequently, and my little brother still lived there, I used to ask him, "Gee, are you the only kid in school who doesn't have a pierced ear?" He'd grimace every time I said it -- but no earring. Eventually the trips home became more infrequent and I'd see him only a few times a year. During one of those lengthy gaps, the boy went out and finally pierced an ear. My father was horrified. I never told him I think I postponed the occurrence for a few years.
Watching my mom, a lifelong non-smoker, die a horrible death from lung cancer (at age 43) while my dad, a lifelong smoker, watched was hard. It was harder still for him, as he couldn't even quit then. Watching him die two years later of heart disease was tougher still. I'm so grateful I never had the urge to smoke, and grateful, too that my kids haven't, either.
I wish I knew what the answer is to preventing smoking, but I don't
In my parents generation smoking was a right of passage. I remember cigarette commercials that touted 4 out of 5 doctors recommend this brand over the other. In my generation smoking went from something that was done in cars filled with children to something that is taken outside and away from the children. The problem with getting people to quit seems to be in the denial that smoking is as much an extreme physical and psychological addiction as is heroin or crack. Yet I don't think I've ever heard of a detox center or 12 step program for smoking. As far as making it unattractive to teenagers, the only thing likely to work is peer pressure and unfortunately most parents aren't ranking really high in the peer group of the rebellious teens who are trying it.
That being said; nobody, not even the life long smoker, deserves cancer. It is an absolute shame that those who are suffering from lung cancer don't get the compassion expressed to those suffering from other cancers.
The ads -- "Talk, they'll listen" -- from the tobacco companies are the worst, I think. Who possibly could believe they are sincere? And I wonder too what they tell their kids when they ask what they do for a living ...
"During questioning at a trial, Carolyn Levy, director of Philip Morris youth smoking prevention programs, admitted that the aim of their programs was to delay smoking until age 18."
The program's must be a success as far as Big Tobacco is concerned.
When I was five, my grandmother died of leukaemia (which kind, I do not know). She had always been a smoker.
I knew dimly even at that age there was a connection between smoking and cancer, and thought "I always thought it was lung cancer you got, but maybe it's not just lung." Or at least I always associated her smoking with her cancer and death.
In retrospect I was almost certainly wrong. But it wasn't a bad connection to make, for someone five years old, and it definitely stopped me from smoking.
My smoking grandfather died of lung cancer and my smoking father of atherosclerotic heart disease at 84 and 59 respectively (the latter some years after a near-fatal stroke that also altered his personality for the worse). My childhood paranoia and militancy vis a vis smoking have been amply confirmed. IMO any Govt. is criminally irresponsible NOT to pass legislation that enables it to shove its arm down the tobacco companies' throats and turn them inside out in the most legally punitive way possible.
I had a childhood friend who used to ask me to buy them once I got above the legal age to do so. I bluntly told her that I would do almost anything else for her, but cared about her too much to do that. She got them anyway (from unscrupulous shopkeepers), but I earned her respect (and from what I am given to understand, still have it today, 20 years later).
Do u like smoking cus it is bad for u STOP SMOKINH