CDC Launches Graphic Anti-Smoking Campaign

You know what would really freak the kids out?
This picture, and Rule 34. Image from HuffPo.

It has been long enough since my last cigarette (14 months ago) that I can confidently call myself a non-smoker. But I smoked for almost 20 years. And you know what didn't make me quit? Threats. Taunts. Finger-wagging. None of that stuff works on a smoker, it just makes you more defiant. It's not like smokers are in the dark about the negative health consequence of the habit. They know. But those consequences seem somehow off in a possible but not certain future. After all, everybody knows somebody who smoked from the age of 14, and died sometime in their nineties, right?

As a current non-smoker--one who is very happy he quit, and wonders why he waited so long to do it--I am rather indifferent to this current campaign. It won't make many current smokers quit. $5 per pack would have done that, were it that easy. But it might make cigarette smoking a bit less cool to the kids who haven't started yet. Or maybe not, who knows? Kids love gory movies, and kids think they're indestructible. If I could rationalize that health consequences were a ways off in my forties, certainly to kids it seems like a hundred years away. So, I don't know.


[Excerpt]

CDC Anti-Smoking Ad Campaign Set To Launch 

In a graphic new ad campaign announced Thursday, the government is trying to shock smokers into quitting with the sometimes-gruesome stories of people damaged by tobacco products.
The new effort confronts a hard truth: Despite increased tobacco taxes and bans in many public places, the adult smoking rate hasn't really budged since 2003. . .

Read more at: Huffington Post