So
we're spending half a million dollars playing on and fueling the stigmatisation of young smokers.
The sight of diseased livers, bloodshot eyeballs and rotting teeth on cigarette packets has almost no impact on young smokers, who view grotesque images as irrelevant, a new study suggests.
Instead, researchers from the University of Otago found warnings that play on young people's fear of social ostracism - and how unattractive they look and smell - are most effective.
Taglines like "Kissing a smoker is not a turn-on", "Everyone can smell a smoker", and "Smoking stuffs your lungs", had the biggest impact on a group of 18 to 30-year-olds.
Recall anti-smoking advocate Richard Edwards' plenary address from a couple of years ago.
We need to be very careful that interventions do not stigmatise smokers. Once again this involves keeping in close touch with how smokers are feeling through in-depth research. These quotes show how the experience of stigma among smokers and practice of stigmatising behaviours can be very real. This reduces support among smokes (and also among non-smokers) for tobacco control and the tobacco free vision, and may drive smokers together in a sort of Dunkirk spirit against the perceived assault from a marginalising society or harden the determination of smokers to smoke, as encapsulated in this last quote. We should be anti-smoking, but never anti-smoker.
I look forward to Otago's future recommendations to combat obesity by telling the obese that nobody likes them.
