Illustrations by EMILY HUNT.
The word “terror” is bandied around a lot these days. Every day we read/see/hear scandalous, irresponsible reportage warning of bearded men lurking around darkened street corners ready to pounce. Pounce on your cigarette and BUTT IT OUT that is!
The real terrorists aren’t working at the 7-11 by day and making homemade explosives by night. They are on the TV frightening us with graphically disturbing footage of wheezing old men, dying babies, bleeding lungs, gangrened feet and custard-clogged arteries. Yes, we are talking about anti-smoking ads.
We all know cigarettes are bad for you, we all know they will kill you, but really – what won’t these days? If we listened to everyone’s sage advice, we’d be living on nothing but bread and water. Scrap that, water is contaminated and carbohydrates will cause weight gain that’ll eventuate in cardiac arrest, so let’s do as the Breatharians do and live off air. I mean, if we’re going to start stamping cigarette packets with warning signs listing just about every health risk known to man, we may as well start labeling ALL consumer products. Imagine Liquor bottles labeled with diseased rotting livers or an image of a drunk hobo passed out in a pool of his own vomit. Or a can of baked beans featuring a grossly obese man blowing gusts of wind from his behind.
You get the point: It’s ridiculous! Everything is bad for you in some way, and as we all know, the key is moderation. Of course you’re going to die if you smoke 20 packs of cigarettes a day, just as you’d collapse of a coronary if you ate MacDonald’s everyday (as some brainiac proved in the documentary Supersize Me).
![Nancy_&_Ronald[1]](../uploads/20080225/4f99c9ad-f783-431d-a5a3-0793a68e1297/files/Nancy_&_Ronald[1].jpg "Nancy_&_Ronald[1]")
Seriously, these oppressors will stop at nothing till they rid the world of the calm, soothing little fuses of pleasure that are cigarettes. The shock-tactics they employ in these warning ads are modern day masterpieces of horror and they have the best team of people working for them because the special effects are amazing! They probably pay top dollar to hire the people that make food look interesting on cooking shows since mostly it looks like barfed-up meat with a bit of oily cheese sauce dribbling about. It’s become something of a joke, even: people at the supermarket picking and choosing which horrific image they want on their cigarette packet. “Umm… no I don’t want the nicotine-stained fingers! Give me the skull and cross bones!”
I mean, it’s really getting to the stage where no one is taking the health risks of smoking seriously at all. One hilarious television ad from the UK showed a group of people standing around on a balcony chain-smoking away, when suddenly the floor collapses, sending them plummeting to their deaths. The end credits roll “Warning: Smoking can seriously damage your health.” Now how can we be expected not to laugh at the absurdity, the extreme lengths they will go to get their point across?
Don’t they know that media bombardment only results in desensitisation? You see it coming and flick the channel, like a sponsor-a-child ad for World Vision. The more it’s rammed down our throats, the less we start to care; that’s just human nature. Mostly the feeling is detachment, like watching a gruesome movie where improbable situations such as having your puss-filled toes amputated, is there to shock. The old “That would never happen to me” way of thought is dismissive and that is what these Ad men have failed to note.
Their mismanaged, over budgeted crusade of lunacy is ploughing everything in it’s path - from the core of this nation, right around the globe. To be statistically correct, that’s a total landmass of 148,939,063.133 km² with 6.65 billion earthly inhabitants that are being stripped of their right to enjoy a… ahem, healthy social life. Yes, I fact-checked on Wikipedia.
Banning smoking in clubs, pubs, restaurants and even certain outdoor areas where social activities take place really is (as another ad tells us) tearing friends apart. Where once you could relax; talking and laughing and blowing smoke in each other’s faces, now smokers are being forcibly ushered into a cold and unpleasant environment (also known as the outdoors) like animals left to fend for themselves. The creation of no-fun zones by these hysterical fitness freaks could surely be avoided if only Corey Delaney: Party Liaison, would take up his self-appointed mantel as party defender and set things straight.
By the way, the TV advertisement I mentioned earlier, in which a guy pontificates: “Cigarettes take you away from your friends” Well, someone we know spotted him outside a theatre, chain-smoking away while his friends were crying inside… Crying about the lousy interior décor no doubt. Since anti-smoking laws have come into play, many pubs have had to adapt by renovating their premises to accommodate segregated smoking and non-smoking areas. In the process, they lost their regular clientele of trusty old boozehounds whose only outlet was hitting the TAB with fag in hand and betting slip in their pocket.
Oh it’s a sad day indeed when I walk into a souped-up dive to see dance music blaring from a video jukebox and a confused old man sitting woefully in a contemporary “retro” surrounding. I feel his pain – those IKEA cube chairs not only hurt my back, but also my aesthetic sensibilities. So you see it’s not just nausea I am overcome with when observing such wildly imaginative propaganda. It is dread for the future and the tediousness of living in a restricted society - where lighting up a simple cigarette in an ‘inappropriate’ area is enough to cause outrage.
![CLASH[1]](../uploads/20080225/4f99c9ad-f783-431d-a5a3-0793a68e1297/files/CLASH[1].jpg "CLASH[1]")
As the Citizens Lobbying Against Smoker Harassment group (C.L.A.S.H) can attest, it may be non-smoking citizen vs. smoking citizen in this dog-eat-dog world, but from the sanctuary of my own home, I can blaze up freely* and watching these delightfully distasteful commercials with all the windows closed and be completely undisturbed.
*for a limited time only.
Raquel Welch and Emily Hunt are the dictators of DUKE magazine, an irreverent and absurdist pop culture, fashion, and art magazine. Launched in December 2006, Issue Trois is available now at selected outlets.