- Share This Post
- Pin It
- 0
- 7
-
Sparkle (2)
The carnival of horrors is coming to the United States at last and all smokers are invited.
On Wednesday, health officials unveiled their plans to replace the text-only warnings on cigarette packs with graphic image warnings, including pictures of diseased organs and corpses.
The Food and Drug Administration, exercising new powers approved by Congress last year, will select nine of the 36 proposed new images, after hosting a lively round of public discourse and doing some reading of the available scientific literature. Come October 22, 2012, any cigarette makers that don't have new warnings on their packaging will be restricted from selling their brands in the U.S.
"When the rule takes effect, the health consequences of smoking will be obvious every time someone picks up a pack of cigarettes," FDA Commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg said.
The U.S. is playing catch-up on its anti-smoking efforts, mostly untouched since 1984, when Congress enacted legislation requiring new warning labels for cigarettes. Some 30 countries already require graphic imagery on cigarette packaging, most notoriously among which is Canada, the first country to require these warnings a decade ago.
But as The Washington Post reported, many health activists find the measure inadequate in a country where one in five adults and teens smoke despite the fact that smoking is the leading cause of premature and preventable death.
As a smoker, I have encountered these warnings, usually when I perceived a change in the wording or when, while traveling in a different country, I encountered the warning in another language. I even collected the warnings, as a sort of travel memento. As far as contemplating my health, they seemed to have no effect.
It's possible that the drastic change from text to imagery will attract some attention, but when I initially contemplated the notion, I wasn't moved.
It reminded me of an incident that occurred at the premiere of National Geographic's Great Migarations in Beverly Hills a few weeks ago with my friend Jason Goldman, who blogged about it. The audience responded with loud dismay when the wildebeest herd lost a calf to hungry crocodiles during their dash across the Mara River. But a few minutes later, these same people stampeded over one another to gorge themselves on the sandwiches, pizza bites and sushi that had been made available at the reception.
There seems to be a disconnect between the world and ourselves, a strange sort of denial. Though we eat meat and fish, we are not predators like the crocodile. Though we run over one another eagerly to get at the last spicy tuna roll, we are not opportunistic eaters. Somehow, we're different.
Somehow, I'm different than the number on that billboard I see every time I take Santa Monica to get home. The number that tallies all the smoking deaths this year.
I think text ads, in their careful and inoffensive manner, do little to shake the denial. Or disconnect. Call it what you like.
Smoking may cause cancer.
I typed that with a cigarette resting between my index and middle finger. Would it give me pause if the package said “Smoking will kill you” instead? Or if the cigarette itself read “I am killing you” or “You're consuming your own life?” Or would that just make cigarettes cool again, somehow fuel a juvenile sense that I'm a consummate contrarian, subversive and invincible, sucking on death?
What about a graphic image? Would that help shake the denial?
I turned my attention to the available scientific literature addressing the use of images in cigarette health warnings.
A study by Michelle O’Hegarty and her team published in The American Journal of Preventive Medicine in 2006, which surveyed a panel of 763 smokers and former smokers between the ages of 18 and 24, found that warnings that made use of text and graphics were more effective in terms of prevention, motivation to quit, motivation not to start smoking, and heightened concern about health effects. Another study, this one lead by Constantine I. Vardavas and published in The European Journal of Public Health last year, found that the 574 teens
