well, not quite Singapore (warning: graphic)

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/22/healt ... ml?_r=1&hp

I don't think there's any doubt that smoking is a dangerous habit. I'm curious, though, if the government could ever get away with hammering other products in the PR market as they do with tobacco.

i doubt it...




every 31 minutes somebody is killed by drunk driving.
every 2 minutes somebody is injured by drunk driving.

The government goes after drunk driving pretty hard, so...

funny, i never noticed quite the same passion on the packaging... and let's not get into the right to bear arms.

my only motive the past few minutes have been to support GH's initial point.

what's your position mr. d.?

and this seems fairly common enough for your comment to be useless: http://www.northescambia.com/?p=22406

How do we do this on one side and continue supporting the price of tobacco on the other?

you mean like this: http://farm.ewg.org/progdetail.php?fips ... de=tobacco

OK, so I accept that banning cigarettes is probably impossible.
But this is silly. It is just weird and will not be very effective. Everyone knows that cigarettes are deadly and dangerous. Everyone in the country. Everyone. This is going to have such a minimal effect on getting people to quit or on stopping people from smoking.
Go after the extraneous and deadly and overly addictive crap that's been added into cigarettes in the last few decades, instead. People will smoke no matter what. Continue and expand education programs, be aggressive in keeping cigarettes away from kids, and make the cigarettes that are available to adults as un-toxic as possible.
Also, tax the shit out of them. I'd love if no one smoked anymore. People who start smoking now, knowing everything that we do, are consciously making a decision that they know is bad. I have no problem with pulling as much money as possible out of their wallets, even if to do nothing else but to support the Medicaid program that they are often burdening.

The Australian government has done this for many years now. It also costs almost $20 to buy a pack of 25 cigarettes. Stores which sell cigarettes are not allowed to display them, they have to be kept in plain white cabinets with no signage except for brand, type and price and obligatory government warnings.

It's seen a decrease to the % of people who take up smoking and an increase to the % of people quitting smoking.

They've just introduced legislation to force tobacco companies to have plain white packaging which allows them only identify the brand name and type while still carrying images similar to the ones above with government health warnings. The tobacco companies are fighting this hard but it's pretty much guaranteed to be passed into law in the next month.

Seems to be a bit much. I like what Argo had to say about it.

Funny, I think the government could do a lot better against drunk driving.

if you got rid of the additives they wouldn't taste as good...

I think the end game for cigarettes is that they won't need to be banned because so few people will smoke them in the first place. It'll probably take another generation or two, but that's my guess--which, of course, is worth about as much as any other prediction.

I can only speak for myself, but I started as a retarded teenager in high school. I knew how bad they were for me, I knew I was slowly killing myself by smoking, but I just didn't care. Any consequence seemed so far away that you feel completely immune to whatever could happen, even though your brain is telling you that's a crock of shit and you're retarded. Like most 16 year old, I felt immortal even though I knew I wasn't.

They've also made it practically impossible to smoke anywhere in public. No smoking in restaurants/bars etc. No smoking within 6 metres of a government building. There is also legislation in the works to prevent people from being able to smoke in their car.

God damned communists.

clearly the terrorists have won, team.

I'm definitely oversimplifying it, but it doesn't sit well with me that something can be legal and this heavily discouraged. I'm not saying we should promote smoking, or let Joe Camel push butts to kids again, but adults should be able to make their own decisions within the realm of legality.

That comment really isn't about labeling, but the trend in tobacco legislation. You see it in what Beef posts about Australia. I mean really, banning smoking in your car?