Posted on 12/09/2013 8:23:38 PM PST by Slings and Arrows
I'm sitting at my desk, looking at a photograph of a gangrenous foot. It is a bloated thing in hues of phlegmatic gray rot, sanguine inflammation, melancholic black bile, and choleric open sores—exhibiting all the humors of a meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council. Above the photograph, in bold white capitals on a dull, matte background are the words “smoking causes peripheral vascular disease.” The photograph is helpfully labeled “gangrene.” Below the photograph, in a bland sans-serif typeface with letters an eighth of an inch high, is “Marlboro Red.”
This is a pack of Australian cigarettes, conforming to that nation’s Tobacco Plain Packaging Act. The act went into effect on December 1, 2012, and is the strictest such legislation in the world.
The act isn’t very strict in its use of the word “plain.” I had to go through 35½ column inches of the Oxford English Dictionary before I arrived at definition 17, “homely: often used euphemistically for ill-favored, ugly.”
And the plain fact is I’ve been a journalist for more than four decades. I’ve listened to a lot of wild tales. But nothing I’ve ever heard—not even in the most hyperbolical regions of the Middle East from fantastical lunatics making their farthest-fetched pronouncements—can match “My mother died of foot gangrene from smoking.”
If putrid tootsies are not your style, there are a variety of other government-mandated images displayed on Australian cigarette packs, such as rotted gums, diseased lungs, a blind eye, a smoker’s corpse, and tongue cancer. Though the tongue cancer photo doesn’t really come off. It has the look of a graphic pornography extreme close-up where the close-up is so extreme that the graphic has displaced the porn.
(Excerpt) Read more at weeklystandard.com ...
He’s a great writer, that’s for sure.
That he is.
People do not realize that the bulk of the price of tobacco is all TAX.
A pack of Marlboro reds is 35c in India.
“When Raúl Castro is your Milton Friedman, you’re ready for the intellectual firing squad. The thought process of Australia’s legislators should be stood up against the wall of common sense. Care for a last cigarette?”
That was a VERY enjoyable read. If he would have kept on writing, I would have kept reading on and on. What a treat.
I remember the 1st time I went to England. I stopped at Harrod’s to see what this fancy pants place had to offer.
Awesome, awesome, awesome. Luv’d the place.
So I purchased a pack of their brand of fags.
Thought it was interesting a department store would have their own brand.
Went to some pub later that evening. Ran into some funny Irish guys and some ruffian from India. Real nice fellas.
Well, we hadsome beers and it was time to light up and enjoy.
I took out my oack of Harrod’s cigy’s and one guy gave a loud laugh and swiped em out of my hands.
He wanted to know what they set me back and I believe it was a bit more than $10 bucks...20 years ago.
They yelled and said I must be rich. I assured them I wasn’t but, why not try fancy cigarrettes.
Well, two guys wanted to try em. We all lit up and they coughed like crazy and tossed their cigarrettes to the ground.
I toughed it out and thought someone had replaced my cig with paper from WWII and my eyes immediatly shot with pain.
Thought I was going to throw up.
I tossed my cig and stomped it dead.
We went back in to wash that taste out of our mouth with something dark and alcoholly....
I looked on the side of the box and there was their version of the Surgeon General warning: This product “Will” cause cancer...
No keedean...
I despise cigarettes. I despise government busybodies even more. Love P. J. O’Rourke.
We don’t hear enough from Peej anymore.
He’s been domesticated. :^(
My Father predicted the odd diseases when the tobacco settlement first went into effect. He said “Theres a huge load of money for the doctors there, but they can only get a piece of it if they can link their specialty to smoking. So watch, soon every medical problem under the sun will be linked to smoking.”
The government makes more money on cigaretts than the tobacco company does...read once the the tobacco company PROFIT is only 6 cents per pack,(or 6 cents per ciggie, I don’t remember which) but that was quite a while ago, the rest is taxes, state, federal, sales tax. And you wonder why they don’t ban it...follow the money, to Washington and the states.
yep
There’s a whole lot of money to be made scaring Americans (and, indeed, the world) about everything from cigarettes to the weather. Scaring people and then creating “charities” — which are really just corporations — to “battle” the menace has made many a man and woman rich.
Absolutely.
It is pure Gov rip off.
The first thing Obama did when he got in office was jack tobacco taxes.
Loose leaf tobacco for cigarettes went form $14 LB to $75 lb.
Companies changed the cut to classify it as a pipe tobacco which got it down to $30 lb.
And where does the tax money go?
Smokers healthcare?
NO! It goes to the SCHIP.
State Children’s healthcare.
Let the people with children’s pay for the children’s healthcare.
O’rourke rules
Nobody does it better
Cute.
Statist Nanny.
Exactly! There’s no Con like a Con with an MD.
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