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 ...
You are a great propagandist.
Love PJ O’Rourke but I see a market for snazzy little cigerette pack covers to hid all those Gawd awful pics.
stickers?
Ping.
This Gov divide and conquer behavior modification is what offends me to the core.
like the ones grandma used?
“...I see a market for snazzy little cigerette pack covers to hid all those Gawd awful pics...”
Believe it or not, they made them illegal!!
It amazes me that in places like Ca you are criminal for smoking a ciggy in your own home, but you can smoke a doobie in the park and it is celebrated.
Two guys can smoke each others poles in the park in front of the kids and it’s diversity..
This country has lost its collective mind.
Yes they did LOL.
Well, now if I hadn’t quit decades ago, I think maybe THAT poster would put me off smokes for good.
LOL
I may be wrong here, but see this from January, 2013....
“TOBACCO companies that try to circumvent the government’s cigarette plain-packaging laws with branded tins or stickers that hide graphic health warnings will face legal action, the federal health minister warns.
“If people deliberately flout these laws, then we will consider and potentially take legal action against them,” Health Minister Tanya Plibersek said.”
I don’t know if they have followed up on this or not...
You know what I don’t understand about the statist nannies?
You could die at anytime from anything.
I bet more people die in car wrecks every year than from smoking.
We all know both are risky.
Why not ban cars or skydiving?
Whitewater rafting or motorcycles?
Guns?
Fires?
BBQ?
Beer?
I HATE STATIST NAZIS.
california never had a mind to begin with and its gone down hill from there. Its got great weather if you don’t pay attention to earth quakes, canyon fires, mud slides and everything else mother nature makes you go through to enjoy the weather. Then she put democrats in charge to top it off. LOL MOther nature really doesn’t like California
“...I HATE STATIST NAZIS...”
I’m with ya, mylife....
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