Anti-tobacco campaign is insensitive and misguided

Ever seen the commercial depicting the “Demon Awards” ceremony in hell with a tobacco executive accepting an award for “Most Deaths in a Year” with Adolf Hitler, Stalin, and other late members of notorious reputations?

Or the one showing “Frances the Lonely Lab Monkey” forced to smoke cigarettes while tobacco researchers snickered? Or one of the many chiding ads alleging the use of odd substances such as urea in cigarette tobacco? There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t see some annoying anti-tobacco ad on television or elsewhere.

Millions of dollars, money which comes from the millions in big tobacco settlements, are being allocated to gross out certain age groups from smoking-not to mention the fact that they aim to scare the hell out of children in order to discourage them from getting hooked.

Experts were astonished to find the number of teens who start smoking had plummeted by one-third from 1997 to 1999 after a 35 percent increase from 1991 to 1997. Several anti-tobacco campaigns believed the reason to be their no-nonsense, edgy approach to tobacco use prevention. Some find these statistics hard to swallow, including myself.

Not only is it difficult to measure tobacco use among an age group as skewed as 13-19-year-olds, but groups who come up with these number never divulge into how they got their numbers-not to mention the fact that their research is biased. What perturbs me is why anti-tobacco campaigns focus so much on teenagers.

Health advocates have argued that telling kids they’re too young to smoke, without explaining why adults shouldn’t smoke only enhances the general appeal of cigarettes and other tobacco products. There are no ads from anti-tobacco campaigns which try to persuade college students and those older to stop smoking-the ones that do exist are advertisements for gum or other methods for the cessation of smoking.

How effective these campaigns are, no one really knows. If a commercial does have the power to make a high school student think twice about smoking-how long does that impression last? Does a television commercial, something that we all hate, really have the ability to alter teenage cognition?

Can it reinforce a child to not smoke even when they are subjugated by blatant peer pressure? Furthermore, it seems that such campaigns are meant to attack big tobacco executives with the futile notion of putting them out of business.

Corky Newton of Brown & Williamson stated, “If [our adversaries] were really concentrating on youth smoking, and not trying to put tobacco companies out of business, we might be able to get at the real issues, like self-esteem, risk-taking, and parental involvement.”

West Virginia’s Attorney General Darrell Mc Graw said, “A lot of those programs impress me as being na

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