Have you seen the images that now disgrace all cigarette packaging here in the UK ?
Under a British Government sponsored initiative the manufacturers of cigarettes and tobacco supplying the UK market are obliged to place some of the most horrendous images I have ever seen on all packaging. The images used include babies in incubators but mainly feature the most ghastly and grotesquely untreated tumours they could apparently find. No British doctor would ever permit such tumours to go untreated to this extent and therefore one must assume that these images where collected from abroad.
It’s Fucking Obscene ! If a private individual published such images in anything other than a medical text book they would be prosecuted and jailed, the offending material being immediately removed from sale and display. Yet the British Government believes that offending the sensibilities of every British and visiting smoker to the UK is justified because of the statistical correlation between smoking and such diseases. Now I am NOT about to argue the case here as to whether or not smoking causes cancer, anyone who smokes is well enough aware that what they are doing is bad for them. What has pissed me off is that the British Government is gratuitously subjecting a very large segment of its population to these obscene images when there is no proof that causing serious offense to smokers will have ANY affect on their consumption of tobacco. The stuff is after all Addictive.
Considering that cigarettes and tobacco are in fact addictive, if the British Government did actually have the courage of its convictions surly the thing to do is to make them illegal? Rather than subject us to disgustingly obscene images every time we reach for one. It occurs to me that the true fact is most likely that, since the British Government is heavily dependant upon the insanely huge tax revenue from tobacco and prohibition would pump these billions of pounds into the hands of organised crime, these horrendous images they have caused to be placed on tobacco packaging are a sop to the anti smoking lobby in the hope that they will shut the fuck up, if only for a while. Meanwhile organised crime is already taking advantage of the huge taxation imposed on tobacco products and looks set to reap even greater profits in the future.
The British Governments’ hypocrisy not withstanding does any government have the right to legislate that obscene material must be published where it can be viewed by minors? Finally it is my considered opinion that causing and giving offense is no way to resolve the problem of smoking.
