Health warning labels.

[insulin]

I am sure that by now it is known that cigarette backs will have horrible pictures on them like dead people’s lungs or bad teeth and other horrible pictures and stuff. Now at our local mall there was this group of people that tried to show us how bad smoking was by sowing us pictures of dying teenagers, old people and dead people’s organs.

Now first of I need to make it clear that I don’t drink or smoke. Because I found no joy in those activities. However what I want to know is why alcohol and the Mobile-phone industry can sponsor sports. Mobile phones might give us brain cancer and is used to record and distribute pictures or videos that can force someone to take his or her own life.

Alcohol is also addictive and can lead to violence, domestic violence, murder, car accidents and fatal health problems. So why not put a picture of an abused victim on the back of every Alcohol bottle or can to inform the public that alcohol can alter your behaviour and make you aggressive towards your family, friends and total strangers.

Also why not put pictures of dead cows, chickens and fish on our meat products so that we can be informed that meat is made by killing an animal with a spike trough the head, decapitation and suffocation then every aspects of its flesh and body gets processed into food products like hamburgers, fried chickens and fish-paste. Also put a dying fat person on every hamburger that get sold to inform the public that you might get fat and might die because of it.

The argument is that smoker’s kills everyone around them, well a drunk driver also kill people around them when they get in an accident. The fact is that everything has some potential to kill you so why not put horrible pictures of dead people onto everything! For example why not put pictures of dead sperm on condom packs to inform people that every time you have safe-sex that you are indeed killing a human being by not allowing the healthy sperm to enter a perfectly healthy womb. “And no I haven’t forgotten about the human immunodeficiency virus but not everyone that uses a condom is HIV positve�

What do you think?

[Dave A]

You make a strong point, Insulin.

The answer probably lies in looking at the lifestyle of the people driving this sort of legislation.

[Marq]

This is a good point. I think it is also related to the tax inputs that each area generates and the source of the products.

It seems though that the pictures and warning messages don't really work anyway. I am not even sure the smoker sees the packet blurb. Once a new smoker is hooked he is more interested in the contents - as long as the outside conformed to a box to keep the stuff in and was the right colour for their brand....then away we go.

There does seem to be fewer smokers around though.....perhaps the war is being won.

[Graeme]

Oh yes - the war IS being won - when I started work there was an ashtray on every desk; as the years went by the number of ashtrays slowly started diminishing and 30 years later the "No Smoking" signs started to appear in those same offices. It is not game, set and match yet, but we're getting there. It is that first smoke as a teenager that is the culprit - a medical man once told me that niccotine is more addictive than heroin.

[insulin]

I don’t agree with war against smoking in the first place. Hardcore drugs is more lethal then smoking and secondly you can actually enslave someone with an hardcore drug addiction. However what of alcohol? See the problem with alcohol is that it alters your aggression and yes I agree not every alcoholic is aggressive but I have seen firsthand how a man hit his girlfriend that she ended up in hospital. The man got off with a warning from the police. “Girlfriend stupidly didn’t press any charges” Sad world...

See smokers and drinkers are easy targets for government they know where to find them and make them pay. Hardcore drugs is not so easy to find and our government is losing the war against drugs. So yes you don’t see smokers anymore because they smoke out of sight. Yet you can find an alcoholic racing down our public roads on Friday happily killing families along the way...

The point I am trying to make is: Pictures don’t control people... LAW controls people! And the LAW is only as strong as the GOVERNMENT that is enforcing it...

[Marq]

Quite Right.....Pictures on boxes is a pointless exercise when the government should be out there enforcing the law. The legal system is also to blame with their judges in the drunk tank, interpretation of the law being skewed and inability to even rope their own in. Sad state of affairs.