Don’t smoke, you wretch on the ash-covered road to ruin

By JAMES LILEKS, Star Tribune

$228 million in Minnesota? In one year? That’s hard to believe. That’s $625,000 a day! Which also comes out to about $50 a year per … read more human in the state. Simply can’t be true.

According to new stats on smoking, more Minnesota teens have decided they don’t want to stand outside when it’s 20 below sucking on highly taxed twitch-sticks. Smoking rates are down, and that’s good. This figure from the study, however, sounded curious:

“The declines occurred even though the tobacco industry now spends about $228 million a year on marketing in Minnesota, up from about $170 million eight years ago.”

Never mind the “even though” — if marketing was just programming for robots, everybody would have joined the Army and Denny Hecker would be diving in money, Scrooge McDuck style. Here’s the real question:

How are they managing to spend a quarter of a billion dollars a year marketing in this state? Billboards have been banned for 10 years. They couldn’t put up a billboard if it said “Smoke Spud — they’re chock-full of toasted cadmium, make your DNA unravel, and each one has more tar than MnDOT’S annual road repair budget, but only a small percentage of the opposite sex will be appalled by your aroma!”

Even then the billboard would have a Surgeon General’s Warning — which, at this stage in the game, should just say AS IF YOU DON’T KNOW or perhaps OH, GO COUGH UP A LUNG. YOU HAVE A SPARE. NO, SERIOUSLY: QUIT.

Smoking has been stigmatized to the point where it’s an immoral act — stand in line at the convenience store, and half the people who ask for smokes have the furtive shame of someone asking for a magazine with trussed-up nurses on the cover.

The anti-smoking advocates, however, aren’t content with the progress made thus far. Movies, they note, glamorize smokers, and this leads gullible teens down the ash-strewn path to perdition.

Well, movies used to make smoking attractive. Look at any movies from the ’40s — most of them should have Phillip Morris listed in the credits as a co-star. Everyone smoked. Rin Tin Tin smoked. You expect to see Shirley Temple doing a tap dance with a Chesterfield dangling from her lips.

Source: http://www.startribune.com/local/36019764.html?elr=KArksLckD8EQDUoaEyqyP4O:DW3ckUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aU7EaDiaMDCiUZ

Related posts:

1. Smoking Rates In The U.S. Decline Below 20 Percent
2. 6 of the Biggest Excuses Smokers Use Against “Stop Smoking” During the Great American Smoke Out
3. Second hand smoke – passive smoking dangers
4. Quit Smoking, Save a Grand?
5. New Tobacco Research Finds Minnesota’s Latino Population Smoking Significantly Less than General Population

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.