Legally required warnings on the side of cigarette packs are meant to be disturbing and to deter smoking. For example, they might shock the smoker out of complacence and force them to reconsider smoking. Or, they might embarrass the smoker into avoiding being seen doing something so damaging in public. Or they might trigger some other emotional response, but the main idea is for the smoker to want to smoke less.
Fair enough.
In this particular case, however, I feel like the message, though disturbing, is not really clear enough to tell the reader much of anything.
Is this suggesting that women who smoke while pregnant may have mentally retarded children? Is it targeted at children who are smoking, warning that smoking might demolish their mental development? Is it targeting those who smoke near children or near pregnant women?
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Reading that label has convinced me that the label writers must have competitions to out-do each other in listing the egregious and terrible ways that smoking can harm us.
The label, which is presumably true, also makes me wonder about how the tobacco industry can make such a terribly harmful product. Their product causes mental retardation in children. That’s a bit more than a scrape on the knee from falling off a bike or a broken arm from jumping off a swing.
I had to admit, the mere sight of “Embassy” cigarettes made me flash back to EA, but I agree — vague warnings lead to vague attempts at quitting, which leads to more cigarette sales. Yeah, I’m a bit biased, but who hasn’t seen Thanks for Smoking?
Did you know that most carcinogens and all of the tar that go into a smokers lungs are added to the cigarette by the smoker. Most of it is caused by the burning of the tobacco.
Smoking is bad. Tobacco is bad. But everybody blames the tobacco companies and farmers for the tar. It just seems a little ironic to me.
Crap, I still don’t know if I fully understand irony. *sigh*
@ Jordan
Nope, I didn’t know that. Very interesting. Any tobacco company ever try to position cigarettes as “decoration” and then blame the user for “misuse” in lighting them?
And nice work on the reference back to the discussion on difficult linguistic concepts.
We blame the tobacco companies for the campaign of obfuscation they ran from the time studies first started documenting the adverse effects of smoking in the 1950s.