smoking damages the health of our

It’s a point of interest to keep an eye out on the latest endeavours to make us smokers feel guilty for our dirty little habit. A few years ago it was decided that we couldn’t see the death warnings on packets properly and therefore didn’t know that smoking kills. So they were made
more prominent, which just gave us something else to become desensitised to. It was a token effort to show that our Government cares about us.

The warnings themselves became something of a joke, with mock versions being sold online as stickers that could be placed over the real
warnings. So instead of ‘Smoking when
pregnant may harm your baby;’ you had ‘Smoking looks cool.’ More importantly, after you’ve read all of the warnings once, there’s no reason to read it again. Just like I don’t read the ‘Premium Quality’underneath the Drum logo on my tobacco pouch, I can just as easily pay no heed
to warnings of impending doom and low sperm counts.

Probably noticing the same thing, the Health Authority has tarted up the warnings to make us think about the message again. Gone is the subtlety of the black on white,we now have white on black, with a bit of red chucked on the most deadly words,tabloid-style.

So where simple but prominent lettering has so obviouslyfailed to make us realise that smoking is bad for our health, it seems that we need to follow many other countries and pop a few illustrations to back the point up. When I was in Australia I was treated to some pretty savage pictures of gangrenous feet and dying smokers.



When I originally wrote this blog, there was a whole section in it about how pussy the whole approach was over here. For the ‘smokers die younger’ warning, we are treated to a shot of the largely covered corpse of someone who appears to have lived to a reasonable age. The ‘protect
children…’ approach is to show some smoke next to a soft focus shot of an infant’s head. The sperm-count warning is a pleasant enough image of some white tadpoles magnified. Nothing to really make me change my mind. The impotence once even makes me laugh out loud.





Then I saw the throat tumour. Not pleasant.
Neither was the mouth cancer shot. The throat tumour in particular shocked me a little, mainly because it seemed to have hair growing out of it. The problem is that I then showed said picture to as many people as possible, and in doing so it has lost all meaning to me. Smokers are a belligerent breed. We stop eating British beef when mad cow disease shows up, and we wouldn’t eat salmonella infested eggs, but we know
that smoking damages our health and we carry on regardless.



We may often feel obliged to say that we want to quit, butin many cases that’s just because we feel that we have to. It’s going to take more than coloured letters and ominous images to make us really think twice about what we’re doing to ourselves.

As smoking is a proven killer and a genuine drain on NHS resources, as well as being harmful to children, a sperm-count reducer and a
fast-track to cancer, then the Government should do the decent thing and make it illegal. They could use the smoking revenue from one year to work on rehabilitating all of us addicts and eradicate the problem forever.

But of course there’s money in them there smokers, isn’t there? With all we know about health, the Government can’t be seen to support smokers, but they sure as hell don’t want us all to stop. Smokers help with the pension shortfall, what with our reduced life expectancy and all. Each day smokers are putting more money in the pot, and the tax we pay on each fix would be sorely missed by the economy.

So instead we get the aesthetic hard line. Yet another pointless initiative that probably costs millions in steering groups and policy making. It’s ticking a few boxes for the time being. But if the point is going to be made, perhaps they should just cut the crap and make us wear t-shirts all of the time with flashing images of children with emphysema mixed in with someone
going through the final stages of throat cancer. Former smokers with voice boxes should stand
outside every shop that sells tobacco, buzzing out the warnings in a Dalek style.

It might make us think a bit more than the current half-arsed endeavours. They should at least pretend that they mean it.