I saw a new Truth.com commercial last night. You know the ones. They stage protests outside of major tobacco companies, demaning to see the CEO and acting surprised when they aren’t allowed to.
Anyway, last night a new one was set outside of the headquarters of Virginia Slims cigarettes. It seems that for a while their advertising slogan was “Find Your Own Voice.” They brought out some lady who used her voice box to ask over a microphone, “Is this the voice you wanted me to find?”
I pit anyone who blames tobacco companies because they smoked. There is no way you thought that it was good for you. You’re inhaling smoke, for fuck’s sake!
How can that possibly not be bad for you? I’m sorry that you are too weak to resist an advertising blitz that “forces” you to smoke, but that’s not my problem and it’s not the Virginia Slims board of directors’ problem either. So quit wasting my time with this bullshit.
And just so nobody thinks I’m a hypocrite, I smoke occasionally. If I end up with lung cancer, I will know that I only have myself to blame.
Cigarette companies did have some culpability in causing a public health hazard insofar as they told people there were no health problems associated with smoking. The tobacco lawsuit settlements with the states a while back put that issue to rest for me. After all, people probably could have figured out that the first-thing-in-the-morning cough jag wasn’t a good thing. New smokers have no excuses.
But I don’t think that truth.org is doing a bad thing here. Its just counter advertisement. Clever too, if you ask me. I think the legal liability for peddaling cigarettes is separable from messing with the ability to pedal cigarettes. I think truth.org is doing the latter, not the former here.
People need to learn that large companies are not responsible for them. This is not a world of Corporate Nannys and if they fuck up on a companies product it is their responsibility alone. That is until, of course, they are injured as a result of a company lying to them or misleading them.
That said I do have to feel sympathetic to those who get cancer or emphysema or any of the other nasties associated with smoking, and those who accept they caused this and deal with it most. Especially considering the people who blame the “baccy” companies give them a bad name.
Just want to point out that the only reason so many people are now aware of the health risks of smoking is precisely because of government-sponsored anti-smoking advertising campaigns. I honestly don’t think that people did know it was bad for them back in the 50s and before.
Yeah, personal responsibility, and all that. Nonetheless, I see someone aiming to open up a “Cyanide Kool-Aid, 50 cents” and even if it has a big banner right out front “Drink this and you die!”…I ain’t gonna let 'em do it. If that makes a nanny out of me, well, so be it.
I don’t understand. You’re saying that people should have just known that inhaling smoke is bad for you? I don’t think that’s even necessarily true. I’m not aware of any evidence that incense is bad for you; it doesn’t carry any warnings on the label.
It’s not just the smoke, Lord Ashtar. There are specific agents in tobacco smoke that cause cancer. That may seem intuitively obvious to you now, but I don’t think that was the case before the second half of the 20th Century.
I find this hard to believe, considering that my grandfather could remember cigarettes being called ‘coffin nails’ when he was a young child in the twenties.
That’s all well and good, but I doubt the lady with the voice box in this particular commercial was smoking in the 50’s. She just doesn’t look old enough.
That probably had more to do with smokers hacking a coughing a lot. People knew that smoking “wasn’t good” for you but medical evidence was not widely discussed.
It wasn’t until the late 50’s and early 60’s that clinical proof linked smoking to serious illnesses.
I’m 50 years old and during my pre-teen years when I was most likely to expirement with cigarettes it was widely known that Cigs casued cancer and were addicting. I decided at that young age that I wasn’t going to smoke anything that wasn’t fun.
To this day I’m amazed at the number of teens and 20’s-40’s who do smoke.
Considering the cost, knowledge of possible addiction, and health issues I cannot for the life of me understand why a kid would put a cig in their mouth. I have three teenagers who feel the same way.
I think there is something rather bizarre when a company can be sued, not only by individuals, but by the government, for selling a perfectly legal product whose primary component is subsidized by the government. If the companies were such evil bastards for daring to promote and sell their product, then why isn’t the government itself responsible for ensuring an ample supply of tobacco for them? It isn’t like the gov’t didn’t monitor and tax the sales of tobacco for decades, they did.
If cigarettes and other tobacco products are dangerous, ban them. It’s not up to a company to decide to put their entire workforce out of jobs and bankrupt their investors, who’s going to make that call?
