You're Doing It Wrong

I think cigarette smoking is a nasty habit. My own substandard-issue bronchial system, which tended to go into shutdown mode in the presence of various kinds of pollen, meant I was never tempted. I confess I was never tempted to suck down car exhaust, either, but that activity never had a good marketing campaign. And I'm extremely happy my mom quit smoking more than a year ago.

At first, I thought the new cigarette label campaign, which put pictures of grotesque tobacco-related health damage and such on the labels themselves, was a good example of a good intention gone so what. They're meant to emphasize that smoking is dangerous. Well and good, but I think the only people today who smoke and don't know that smoking is dangerous live in the mountains away from TV, radio and computers and grow their own tobacco. Warning labels won't matter much to them.

Many other people who smoke either want to keep doing it or for one reason or another have too hard of a time quitting. If you've visited a 12-step recovery group for people who drink or who have used drugs, you will find that the surgeon general's opinion ranks low on the list of issues they consider during a day. And that when you set it up against some of the stuff they've ingested, the dangers of tobacco rank pretty low.

So new, super-gross warning label pictures seemed at best like those Death on the Highway-styled movies they showed us in driver's ed -- attractive to those with a ghoulish streak in them and ultimately ineffective as a deterrent because they were so over the top no one could believe them.

Then I read this story, in which an official with the Department of Health and Human Services said some of the photos in the labels were fakes. Whatever minimal value these graphic labels may have had as a deterrent just went...up in a puff of smoke, I guess. "Those pictures aren't real; smoking doesn't do that," the deniers will say. Since the truth is that at least some of the pictures aren't real, why should HHS's word be taken that any of them are? Or that smoking is that damaging? Don't worry -- I still know that it is. But that's because I read.

A warning label campaign based on pictures seems to me like a warning label campaign aimed at people who may not read as much. Although I may be over-generalizing about people who don't read as much, I'm going to bet a sizable percentage of them are going to be perfectly happy to believe that faked photos equal faked danger equal no harm in lighting up.

An old saying about someone who lacked competence was that "he couldn't hit the floor with his hat." When it comes to the federal government, we find people who most certainly can hit the floor with their hats. The only problem is that they don't take the hats off their heads first.