Targeting Smokers With Graphic Images

With all the doom and gloom on the front pages of the national press it is a welcome change to note that there is a snippet of good news hidden near the back on the health pages. Apparently we have signed up to be the first country in Europe to do something positive for the health of the nation - no not to retire Gordon Brown, but to introduce a series of 15 graphic reasons to encourage smokers to seek help to give up the weed.

Replacing health warnings on cigarette packets with images of diseased lungs and heart surgery is quite a good idea but in my mind does not go far enough. The fact that it will take around one year for these images to appear on all packets being sold shows, in my opinion, that cigarette companies are not that committed to reversing the health issues surrounding smoking. As a good health gesture they should have picked a date to role out the new image carrying packets and withdrawn all old stock on that same date.

The graphic images they intend using have proved to be very effective in Canada where around a third of people who quit smoking cited the images as the main reason. We are not told the average age of these quitters but I would not be surprised to find out that they were of the more mature variety. As one gets older it is easier to be made to feel vulnerable, be it to disease or violence or other life ending situations. But if you think back to your youth, life threatening experiences were not something you felt concerned about. As a youngster you were more likely to have imagined yourself immune to such dangers, possibly invincible. Why should you worry about something that might, only might, happen to you 15 to 20 years down the line.

For this reason I do not believe this idea will target the 'younger' more blase smokers. Taking the long term view of health issues around smoking, targeting the youngsters would have made sense. Playing with the idea of graphic images, or brain storming, I would like to put forward an additional scenario. All children entering secondary school level should be subjected to a series of visits to cancer wards. They should be shown the 'real' effect of smoking on real (sick) patients, see the coughing up of sputum and blood, see someone trying to get their breath, talk with relatives and see the effect these smoking related diseases have on them as they watch their loved ones succumb to the inevitable. Putting youngsters in to real everyday situations, giving them visible uncontestable facts, might just have the desired effect, and stop them smoke in the first place. Putting graphic images in front of them 10 years down the line as hardened smokers seems rather too little and too late.