Smoking is absolutely filthy!

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is proposing new large-print, highly graphic warnings on cigarette packs, such as the one to the left.  There are 36 more being proposed, and nine will be chosen.  These warning will comprise 50% of the front and rear panels of each cigarette packet, and 20% of any cigarette ad.  The images are appropriately disgusting  and jarring.

I think smoking is revolting.  It smells bad. It looks bad.  It makes people sick - fatally so.  It irritates non-smoking bystanders.  The foul smell sticks to clothes, hair, furniture, carpets, window shades, and tableware.  It turns teeth yellow and brown.  Kissing a smoker feels like kissing an ashtray. Sooner or later the young , hipster smoker turns into a hacking, addicted, aged-beyond-their-true-age, old, sick person smoking in the rainy, cold under an awning.

If my own personal horror does not make it clear enough, here are some hard facts from the NYTimes article on the new FDA warnings:

Public health officials are hoping that the new labels will re-energize the nation’s anti-smoking efforts, which have stalled in recent years. About 20.6 percent of the nation’s adults, or 46.6 million people, and about 19.5 percent of high school students, or 3.4 million teenagers, are smokers. Every day, roughly 1,000 teenagers and children become regular smokers, and 4,000 try smoking for the first time. About 400,000 people die every year from smoking-related health problems, and the cost to treat such problems exceeds $96 billion a year.

Smoking is increasingly stigmatized these days - if I have friends or colleagues that do smoke they would likely not be "out" in their habit.  In all honestly, I have less respect for smokers. I was devastated when I learned that Obama is a smoker, albeit a reticent and humbled addict. I'd even go as far to say that I find them disgusting themselves.  But I can't go that far because in all honesty, I feel sorry for them and their addiction and our shared human frailty.

I hope my daughter never starts.  Admittedly, I have smoked cigarettes at various times in my life.  I tried my first cigarette at about 12 years old...

Around 13 years old, I pretended to be a smoker, but bought wimpy packs of ultra-light, slim menthol that I would throw out after smoking two or three for fear my mom would find them.  I'm sure the clerks sold them to me because they were convinced I was buying for my grandma.  I mean, what self-respecting teenager smokes ultra-light, thin menthol cigarettes?  In college when I was studying in Dakar, several of my housemates smoked, and I'd occasionally bum a cigarette to join them, but I never enjoyed it, and never finished one.  Until, one day, I forced myself to finish one disgusting cigarette so that I would not acquire the appetite leading to the addiction.  I didn't smoke any more that year.  In grad school, in hip New York, with smoking friends at long, free-flowing wine dinner parties and in West Village bars, I'd smoke a cigarette if I was really drunk.  It became one of the ways I'd know I must be really drunk. Until slowly, I realized that the next day my throat was scratchy and irritated, and my clothes and hair smelled disgusting.  That put an end to that pretty much.  And as smoke-free restaurants and bars became the norm in California, New York, and DC, I became more and more aware of how bothered I was by the effects of even secondhand smoke.  I feel fortunate that I escaped the habit that leads to the addiction. 


Smoking is a filthy habit.  I'm pleased to see that bigger, bolder grosser smoking warnings on cigarettes packs and advertisements are on the way.  Such ads have been shown to make a difference in enticing people to quit.  The new ads will not be required on cigarette packs and advertisements until October 2012 - not soon enough as far as I'm concerned, but a step in the right direction.