To put it in perspective, more people die each year in the US from lung cancer than are run over, murdered, killed iatrogenically, suffer from lack of healthcare and were killed in 9/11 combined. Assuming smoking only contributed half of those deaths and one merely has to subtract the “iatrogenic” causes for that statement to be true - and it doesn’t even consider the contribution smoking has to heart disease and other illnesses.
Good question. The answer is because they willingly appeared on TV in order to give the message that they are gross. Just like when someone goes around throwing insults at people, they don’t get to whine when people throw them back. The people communicated that finding them gross is acceptable.
Plus I will always have a problem with people who intentionally try to make people feel bad unless they are defending themselves or someone else against the same sort of thing. Smokers have not hurt you, so this sort of tactic should be off limits.
I might make an exception if smoking were this horrible problem that nothing else was working on. But it’s not. The number of smokers is dramatically falling. The culture as a whole thinks that smoking is bad. Very few people are smoking because they think it is cool, so there’s no reason to combat that idea. The tactics from before work. Use them, don’t invent another tactic that causes more distress.
If they want to keep the crap that was going as it was when I was a kid, fine. Update the stuff that was made before. But don’t hit below the belt like this. Not when it’s completely unnecessary.
“You Don’t Always Die from Tobacco” (the one with the two cowboys singing in the street) is a hideously catchy one-note song. I have replayed it many times.
She puts on her wig, inserts her voice box, and heads to her job at the abused animal shelter filming quivering dogs in slo-mo while Sarah McLachlan plays.
No, it’s not. Not anymore. It *was *dramatically falling, yes. But then it got to around 20%, and we can’t seem to move it down much, or quickly, from there. U.S. smoking rate hasn't changed, CDC says
Do you have a cite for that?
I think this *is *an update of “crap that was going as it was” when I was a kid. This campaign looks like a direct descendent of Smoking Is Very Glamorous, which was put out in 1972, and on the walls of many of my classrooms in the 80’s.
I don’t care for smokers or smoking either … I just want the government out of their bedroom and any other room they might be smoking in.
Oh, gallows chuckles here. I was thinking the same thing.
At least she is sharing her ailment of her own volition. These third world spots and mailings of children with birth defects/famine and tortured animals strike me as the worst exploitation. I think of them as victim porn.
Lest I’m thought heartless, I spend time weekly in nursing homes with sorely afflicted and dying people. Mainly I ask for people who never have any vistors.
And that relates to the OP. When I was a small child it was more common to see all manner of physical disabilities on the street. Although there were no Americans with Disabilities Act or education in the public schools to accept them as equals they were THERE. And it was just taken for granted that some people had misfortune.
Now, many are safely tucked away in care facilities, hospices and nursing homes and we don’t have to be reminded so often that life is sometimes ugly and unfair.
So many people spend their last years alone and then die with strangers taking care of them I can’t help but wonder if people are repulsed by visiting. Or afraid.
So, in a sense, I see that woman, disfigured by cancer and sense a certain brave defiance in her act of revelation.