So now the FDA is going to require unpleasant graphics or photos to cover the top half of cigarette packs sold in the U.S. Some of them are really disgusting. Now, I don’t smoke (I stopped when I was 23), but there’s something wrong with these pictures.
I feel sorry for you if you do smoke. Beside the health issues, it’s just plain difficult. The number of places where you’re allowed to do so is diminishing rapidly. The people pass initiatives to load punitive taxes on cigarettes. Smoking used to make you look sophisticated; those days are over.
But I see a really slippery slope here. If the government is going to start requiring those who put out potentially bad products to post ugly pictures on their packaging, where is that heading? Instead of the fancy label on that $30 bottle of wine you just bought, will there someday have to be a photo of a cirrhosis-scarred liver on the bottle? Or how about pictures of fat kids on Coke cans? Or someone throwing up after eating hamburger meat with E. coli?
Attempts to force physicians to show pictures of aborted fetuses to women opting to get that procedure have been blocked consistently. So why are these cigarette-pack graphics any better?
Gross-out therapy has been tried before. I heard a neurologist, who’s an expert on addiction, interviewed on NPR yesterday. He said that in the short term, such measures do actually work, causing people to want to give up bad habits and discouraging newbies from starting or continuing with them. But after a while, the effect wears off – we humans can adapt to almost anything -- and we’re left with just that extra little bit of required ugliness in our environment, accomplishing very little.
It’s an accepted fact that smoking kills people. Even alcohol, in moderation, is purported to have some health benefits. But tobacco has virtually nothing to recommend it, except that the plants help repel certain insect pests in gardens. So if it’s so awful, why doesn’t government stop fooling around with these behavior-altering schemes and simply ban tobacco outright, maybe after a five-year warning?
Cold turkey is really the only thing that works. And it’s a lot cheaper.
Friday, June 24, 2011
Friday, June 17, 2011
The Madding Crowd
The riot in Vancouver following the Canucks loss to the Boston Bruins in the Stanley Cup hockey contest has turned into a sort of scientific phenomenon that social theorists are trying to figure out. For starters, this was Canada – the last place you’d expect something like that to happen.
The cops and the media struggled with whether this should be called a “riot” or not. Well, “riot” these days has a connotation of humor or enjoyment, and a lot of the participants in Vancouver who were looting stores and burning cars were actually enjoying themselves – which is really sad. It had nothing at all to do with losing the Stanley Cup. So “riot” works fine for me.
The theorists divided the crowd into three main layers. The first were the actual troublemakers; the second stood by cheering them on, and the third were spectators. Layers two and three didn’t have the cojones to actually cause trouble themselves, but they sure enjoyed watching it – and having their own pictures taken in front of scenes of mayhem on their smart phones.
There were probably fourth and fifth layers – the fourth being people who wanted to get out of the crowd and were trapped, and the fifth being the few people who tried to prevent those in the first layer from doing the damage. Some were beaten up for trying.
The Vancouver cops were adhering to a plan, apparently designed to control the crowd without confronting it -- which may be supported by police science, but generally not acceptable to the public, who would have preferred heavy tear gas and clubs swinging. Some say the city should have never invited people to go downtown to watch the hockey game on big screens. There simply weren’t enough cops, it appears, to handle those crowds. They say the city may have been lulled into a false sense of security by the success of the Olympics, crowd-wise, but then, there were 8,000 police on duty. The only good news was that there was no shooting among the crowd – they don’t do handguns in Canada.
Vancouver just happened to have a convention of travel bloggers in town during Wednesday night’s activities – whoops!
It’s my belief that social media and smart-phone technology have become the steroids fueling these events. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against these things at all. But if Facebook and Twitter can cause an Arab spring, what role did they play in Vancouver? With these modern marvels, the human race clearly has a tiger by the tail, and had better figure it out fast.
The cops and the media struggled with whether this should be called a “riot” or not. Well, “riot” these days has a connotation of humor or enjoyment, and a lot of the participants in Vancouver who were looting stores and burning cars were actually enjoying themselves – which is really sad. It had nothing at all to do with losing the Stanley Cup. So “riot” works fine for me.
The theorists divided the crowd into three main layers. The first were the actual troublemakers; the second stood by cheering them on, and the third were spectators. Layers two and three didn’t have the cojones to actually cause trouble themselves, but they sure enjoyed watching it – and having their own pictures taken in front of scenes of mayhem on their smart phones.
There were probably fourth and fifth layers – the fourth being people who wanted to get out of the crowd and were trapped, and the fifth being the few people who tried to prevent those in the first layer from doing the damage. Some were beaten up for trying.
The Vancouver cops were adhering to a plan, apparently designed to control the crowd without confronting it -- which may be supported by police science, but generally not acceptable to the public, who would have preferred heavy tear gas and clubs swinging. Some say the city should have never invited people to go downtown to watch the hockey game on big screens. There simply weren’t enough cops, it appears, to handle those crowds. They say the city may have been lulled into a false sense of security by the success of the Olympics, crowd-wise, but then, there were 8,000 police on duty. The only good news was that there was no shooting among the crowd – they don’t do handguns in Canada.
Vancouver just happened to have a convention of travel bloggers in town during Wednesday night’s activities – whoops!
It’s my belief that social media and smart-phone technology have become the steroids fueling these events. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against these things at all. But if Facebook and Twitter can cause an Arab spring, what role did they play in Vancouver? With these modern marvels, the human race clearly has a tiger by the tail, and had better figure it out fast.
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Patterns
I’d like to join in expressing shock and shaking my head at the revelations about New York Congressman Anthony Wiener’s sexual tweets, but frankly, I’m exhausted. Let’s see, there’s our ex-governor, there’s John Edwards, Tiger, the IMF guy – I’ll let you finish the list. The sad part of these stories, of course, is the damage, not just to the villain du jour, his family and to potential victims, but to our faith in those presumed to be leaders and role-models among us – how many more hits can that faith take?
More often than not, the volcano of publicity erupts following an event that is simply a pattern, perhaps a longstanding one, coming to the surface – and we all have patterns. It doesn’t have to be sexual. It could be about drinking, eating, shopping, gambling or playing videogames. It starts out as a predilection, then becomes a pattern. If we lose control of the pattern and it gets destructive, we call it addiction. What follows are unbelievable lapses of judgment, lies, and the betrayal of those we love. It’s just very easy to say, “How could he…?”(or she) when that isn’t one of our own patterns. There are as many strokes as there are folks.
Congressman Weiner’s resignation is the right course, simply because no one will take him seriously again for a very, very long time. But I wonder: if his problem had been alcoholism, a potentially more debilitating and destructive addiction, would we have been more forgiving?
Before we play the “ain’t it awful” game, maybe we should reflect on our own performance at dealing with patterns. For starters, how about our insatiable appetite for every last sordid detail of these stories, served to us by cable TV reporters breathlessly expressing shock and amazement. They should be sending thank-you notes to these perpetrators, maybe with an expensive bottle of wine. They know very well how much we out here in the audience love train wrecks.
More often than not, the volcano of publicity erupts following an event that is simply a pattern, perhaps a longstanding one, coming to the surface – and we all have patterns. It doesn’t have to be sexual. It could be about drinking, eating, shopping, gambling or playing videogames. It starts out as a predilection, then becomes a pattern. If we lose control of the pattern and it gets destructive, we call it addiction. What follows are unbelievable lapses of judgment, lies, and the betrayal of those we love. It’s just very easy to say, “How could he…?”(or she) when that isn’t one of our own patterns. There are as many strokes as there are folks.
Congressman Weiner’s resignation is the right course, simply because no one will take him seriously again for a very, very long time. But I wonder: if his problem had been alcoholism, a potentially more debilitating and destructive addiction, would we have been more forgiving?
Before we play the “ain’t it awful” game, maybe we should reflect on our own performance at dealing with patterns. For starters, how about our insatiable appetite for every last sordid detail of these stories, served to us by cable TV reporters breathlessly expressing shock and amazement. They should be sending thank-you notes to these perpetrators, maybe with an expensive bottle of wine. They know very well how much we out here in the audience love train wrecks.
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