Confession time: I'm a smoker. I know, it's a horrible, terrible, stupidly expensive habit. I started smoking when I was eighteen, and quit when I was twenty-one. However, a few months ago I was under a lot of stress with school and family stuff, and found myself right back to my old habit. So why is this random fact about myself important? Because smoking is the subject of this post. Rather, an anti-smoking campaign is the subject of this post. There is a campaign against smoking called "The Truth", it is aimed towards younger people to get the truth about smoking out there, so that teens and young adults won't smoke, or will stop smoking. In their ads, they sometimes show statistics, an example being that teenagers smoking has now gone down to 8%, but sometimes they have ads that contain people actually smoking cigarettes. As a smoker, I can tell you that nothing will make you crave a cigarette more when you're trying to quit, than seeing someone smoke, even if it's on TV. While I applaud the fact that they are trying to get young people to realize how dumb smoking is, and get them to pledge that they will never even attempt smoking, I can't help but to feel that most of their methods are ineffective, if not damaging. Advertising cigarettes on TV has been illegal since the 70s, so why are they showing people smoking on their anti-smoking campaigns? I feel that it would be more effective if they showed what actually happens when you smoke. I have seen commercials like this called "Tips From Former Smokers." These commercials are provided by the CDC, and show the complications former smokers have had in their lives due to smoking cigarettes. Those advertisements really make me want to quit, because they show the reality of the damaging effects of cigarettes. "The Truth" campaign needs to focus more on advertising that way, and stop showing people actually smoking cigarettes.
