Anti-smoke campaign

What seems to have surprised the health authorities most about the current anti-smoking campaign is the fact that it appears to be having very little effect on the younger sectors of society. However, this is hardly surprising. You can certainly frighten older people with cancer, imminent slow death and other such dangers, but most under twenty-year-olds can’t even conceive what this means. They can’t see far enough ahead to fear death: if they imagine their own funeral, it is a self-indulgent vision, with all their favourite friends sobbing and saying how unfortunate and gorgeous they were. Young people live in the right now, and what they are really afraid of, right now, is smelling bad and looking ugly. You can frighten 16-year-olds with an exaggerated threat of smoker’s halitosis, that sickly smell that no amount of chewing gum can get rid of. You know – the smell that other people detect even when you can’t; the kind that makes members of the opposite sex turn away when you try to kiss them for the first time.

In the 1980s, public health advertisements in Britain tried to extract the attraction from heroin with the slogan "Heroin screws you up" and a picture of a teenager with a really dreadful skin.

The slogan may not have been very effective, but the acne worked well. I suggest that different anti-smoking campaigns should be designed for different age-groups, and that those for young people should show what it does to the living, and forget about threats of death.