New anti-smoking initiatives might be misguided

Last year, Congress passed a law that granted the Food and Drug Administration the power to regulate tobacco products. It was required, under that same law, that cigarette companies dedicate half of the surface area of each pack of cigarettes to graphic reminders of the dangers of smoking.

On Wednesday, the FDA revealed 36 of these proposed warning labels, with images ranging from oxygen masks to babies in smoke filled rooms to the pallid feet of a corpse, tagged on the big toe and awaiting autopsy in the morgue. As off putting as some of these images may be, they appear benign with what’s to be found in nations such as Singapore, where one particular pack boasts the gory profile of a man missing the dermis of his right cheek. Other images of oral decay routinely make appearances as well.

Affecting though this tactic against tobacco may be, there’s not much evidence to suggest that it actually achieves anything in the long run. In fact, there may even be growing support for alternative opinions.

A team of researchers from the United States, Switzerland and Germany put forth the notion a year ago that presenting smokers with the idea of death will actually drive them further into their habit as a means of somehow coping with the consequences of their actions. This aspect of the study comes across, quite frankly, as little less than preposterous, and doesn’t seem to provide any insight worthy of employment in this debate. On a more relevant note, though, it looks like social stigma trumps death in the mind of the young smoker. The team found higher levels of efficacy in warnings unrelated to health, such as those that came with the admonishment that “smoking makes you less attractive”.

But the case against this anti-smoking initiative doesn’t come just from innovative (or, more appropriately, “out there”) studies; it can be derived as well from the numbers.

The most influential of the factually based arguments must be that of the power of education in smoking trends. A 2006 NHIS study showed that “smoking prevalence decreased as education level increased, with 46.0% of GED-level adults smoking and 35.4% of those with 9-11 years of education smoking.” Really, though, this should come as no news, as statistics across other risky behaviors tend to mirror this trend, the most obvious example being that of teen pregnancy (education level may be a misnomer in that case, as the pregnancy may be the root of the abbreviated education and not the other way around, but the phrase “education quality” can be substituted just as easily).

The issue of teen pregnancy runs a convenient parallel to the new FDA anti-smoking measures, mainly in the past employment of graphic scare tactics involving images of genitalia affected by sexually transmitted diseases. If this technique, primarily achieving little more than discomfort for instructor and student alike, is facing extinction in learned circles, then why is it being plugged right back into other government initiatives? Likely there is little communication between the parties responsible for these separate measures, but it’d be nice to live in a world where common sense prevailed.

If the FDA truly wishes to reduce the rate of adult smoking to at or below 12 percent in the coming years, then it would be wise to quit stabbing in the dark and instead evaluate its options for attack on some sort of body of evidence. Studies such as the ones mentioned above are successful in their elucidation of the nature of smoking habits because they seek to get behind the brow of the smoker and think as he does, rather than ramming their speculative and self-ingratiating heads against the wall. After all, casual smokers seem to be dropping by the dozen around here now that they’ve been reduced to the sort of second-hand citizen status typically reserved for non-voters on college campuses, and are having to find their relief farther and farther away from any building with an air intake.