Prediction: Scare Tactics Won’t Have Much Effect
According to this story in the Queens Courier Online, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene is planning to spend $1.25 Million on a “harrowing” new stop-smoking campaign.
The campaign apparently will feature ads with graphic images, such as black tar dripping from saturated lungs into a beaker, and “echo ads”, where a current smoker makes a statement which is echoed by another smoker, but with a twist: the first ad stars two young men:“I can’t go more than a few hours without a cigarette,” says one. The other, lying in bed, suffering from some tobacco-related illness, whispers, “I can’t go more than a few feet without the oxygen tank.”
Nobody asked, but based on my observations of my own behavior as a smoker for over 35 years, and the behavior I’ve observed in the hundreds of long-term smokers I’ve met and worked with over the last 6 years or so, the campaign will have little discernible effect beyond spending $1.25 million of the NYC Health Department’s budget.
Which is fine, if depleting the Health Department’s budget is the goal, but scare tactics had no effect on me for 35 years, and affected only a very small percentage of the hundreds of long-term smokers I’ve known and observed over the last 6 years on my own quit-smoking support site and others.
We all knew that smoking was bad for us; we just didn’t care: we’re addicts.
And tragically, we’re addicted to a drug that’s not only cheap, legal and in plentiful supply, but our pushers, rather than being some low-life dealing their poison out of the back of a van or from some dark alley, are giant corporations with multi-billion dollar advertising budgets and the blessing of government at all levels.
For instance, the NYC Health Department is going to spend $1.25 million on this campaign to discourage people from smoking, but, if all of New York’s million-plus smokers only smoke a pack a day, the $1.50/pack cigarette tax that NYC imposes brings in more than that in tax revenues in a single day.
Get real, New York; if you want to discourage smoking in your city, make it illegal to smoke there. Of course, then you’d also have to make it illegal to sell cigarettes there, too, and you’d lose more than a half a billion dollars a year in tax revenue…
You can’t have it both ways.
