Christopher Gage on the Canadian government’s ludicrous next anti-smoking campaign, putting scary messages on every single cigarette in a pack:
I resisted smoking until age ten. Back then, the local boys and I would tramp over the local fields in search of dried ferns upon which to practise the deadly, seductive art of smoking.
By high school, we’d graduated onto the proper cancer sticks. Every morning, we’d pool together our lunch money, and skulk outside the off-license in wait for a nameless reprobate to slip into the shop and, for buyer’s rights of one cigarette, smuggle us ten Lambert and Butler.
Since then, save four years of misguided, anti-smoking zealotry, I’ve smoked with a sinful enthusiasm. Few share my woeful pursuit.
This week, Canada announced a “world-first”. They’ll soon begin printing health warnings directly onto cigarettes.
Neophiles with an addiction to “progress” laud this wearisome world-first. Giddy are the pink-lunged puritans.
Sorry to be facetious, but if I were a teenager and I read on a cigarette the words, “Poison in every puff!” I’d think it was a catchy marketing jingle. I’d happily sign up for a lifetime of chuffing away my health.
Perhaps they should market specifically to Millennials. “Who cares? You’ll never buy your own home,” is particularly resonant.
This is all part of a scheme to cut smoking rates to below five percent by 2035.
Reader, what happens then? Once the health fascists defeat us smokers, from whom shall they siphon their righteous fix?
The irony: as smoking declines, obesity balloons. Between 2003 and 2017, obesity deaths spiked by a third. One in four deaths is now related to one’s weight. Corpulence chalks more bodies than the cancer stick.
I’m yet to see a warning label plastered on the side of a family bucket of KFC. But give it time.
You can live as long as you like, as long as you don’t like living.
