The plain facts
Breathlessly exciting news……..
Plain cigarette packaging hits shelves across Republic.
Though in fact they are just saying that same packs are only beginning to appear, but they just can’t contain themselves with excitement. It’s like announcing that summer has arrived because someone has spotted a daffodil?
“Our aim is to decrease the appeal of tobacco products, to increase the effectiveness of health warnings and to reduce the chances of consumers being misled about the harmful effects of smoking,”
So the aim isn’t to stop kids smoking or to disgust the rest of us into quitting? Well, they can hardly claim that as it hasn’t had the blindest affect in the countries where it has already been introduced. The aim is solely to confuse shopkeepers and customers by making one brand indistinguishable from another and to make counterfeit products easier to sell.
The funny thing is thought that I doubt anyone buys a pack of cigarettes for the pack itself? They are far more interested in the contents. Maybe in Tobacco Control’s strange la-la land they have the impression that we smoke the packaging and not the tobacco?
As for the rest, I am fairly sure there isn’t a sinner out there who isn’t aware of the propaganda and the medi-porn. Your silly little messages have been on the packs for decades and the little pictures have been getting larger and larger over the years. People know about them and have become so accustomed to them that they have become invisible. First you told us and we ignored you. So you shouted your message instead and we still ignored you. Plugging in an amplifier and screaming in our ears is not going to make any difference to your “message” but will just piss us off. But then that’s the real reason behind the packaging, isn’t it? You really do like pulling the wings off flies, don’t you?
The plain fact about plain packs is that they are invisible anyway. I meet a lot of smokers and I honestly could not tell what brands they smoke, as they discreetly remove a stick and slip the pack back in their pockets straight away. Tobacco Control must be under the misapprehension that we all place our packs proudly on the table and stare at them admiringly. We don’t. When my tobacco pouch is empty I break open a new pack and decant the contents straight into the pouch. The original packaging goes in the bin and for the life of me I couldn’t tell you which message or medi-porn was on the cover.
Interestingly there is another article in the same paper –
Cancer research ‘critical’ as incidence set to rise 90% in 25 years.
Oh dear! That’s a bit awkward? Smoking had declined considerably since I was a lad, but cancer is rising at a “critical” rate? Surely rates should be dropping if we are to believe all those nice people in Tobacco Control? Could it be that Tobacco Control are wrong and that all their efforts have come to nothing?
Now there’s a challenge for an epidemiologist?
Not a bad idea. Though I have a leather tobacco pouch for the pipe, and I already decant cigarettes into tins for Herself.
The worst part is having to examine every fucking pack to be sure I have the right brand.
Now there’s a challenge for an epidemiologist?
Hardly a challenge, what with nicotine having a ‘half life’ longer than that of weapons grade uranium and tobacco smoke residue sticking better than ‘No More Nails’ to anything it touches…people today are DYING because their great grandads once had a pipe. FACT !
I was going to say what The Blocked Dwarf said, but I was too late. Bummer.
He’s a fast mover all right. So in essence there is fuck all point in giving up the smoking if our descendants for the next thousand years are going to die anyway.
‘Our descendants for the next thousand years’ are going to die anyway, whether or not tobacco has ever been involved in their ancestry or lifestyles. That’s life – or more accurately, that’s death – all lives come to an end, naturally or otherwise.
The anti-tobacco lobby gets away with claiming that not smoking will stop you dying: it won’t, you’re gonna die, the only issue is when. Smoking may or may not make that event occur sooner: the jury’s still out on whether, for whom and by how long.
An interesting article. It’s about airport scanners, however about para 8 the doctor gives some very interesting facts about the effect of CT scans and their ability to cause cancer.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-5410187/ASK-GP-airport-scanners-cancer.html
And I’d be looking at that horrid muck they make you drink beforehand as well as that injection they use while you’re in the device.
In other words, CT scans cause far more problems than second hand smoke. But it’s the “good guys” who are doing the damage so that’s all right then.
It could be logically argued that medical research is responsible for cancer: in days of yore, most of us would have shuffled off this mortal coil from one or more of a plethora of (now curable) nasty diseases; or died worn-out from a lifetime of seriously arduous toil; or from having annoyed the local gentry or their men-at-arms, so most of us probably wouldn’t have made it to 50 years old. Now the local squire can’t bump us off at will, and most nasty illnesses are no longer the threat they were, cancers are appearing amongst the elderly whereas centuries ago, the percentage of elderly wrinklies was very much lower.
Spot on. Every few years [seven or so?] each cell in the body replicates and replaces itself. The more replications, the greater the chance of an error creeping in. DNA is after all just a code, and once an error creeps into that code then the error will also replicate. The longer you live, the greater the chance of those accumulated errors will cause major problems. Cancer is mainly a disease of old age.