No Tobacco Day 2014

Tomorrow is May 31st, No Tobacco Day; the theme of this year´s celebration is "Raise taxes on tobacco". Do you think it is likely to work? Why (not)?

No Tobacco Day 2013

May 31st, No Tobacco Day; in 2013, the theme is ban tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship 

How much do you know about smoking? Test yourself with this quiz

Governments all over the world launch campaigns to encourage smokers to quit smoking; the messages are explicit but they do not seem to work. Let´s consider this smoking campaign in the UK: the ad shows a tumour growing on a cigarette as it is smoked, trying to demonstrate that just 15 cigarettes cause a mutation that can lead to cancerous tumors. This is the message:

“When you smoke, the chemicals you inhale cause mutations in your body. And mutations are how cancer starts. Every 15 cigarettes you smoke will cause a mutation. If you could see the damage, you’d stop.”

And this is the video. Watch it and give your opinion about it: do you think it is an effective campaign? why (not)? 

What about this one?

Click here to see other graphic anti-smoking ads.

Have a look at the advertisements below; which one do you like best as an anti-smoking ad? Explain the reasons for your choice: 

No Tobacco Day: Anti-Smoking Campaigns

Let´s start this entry with some facts related to smoking. The following presentation, which got the first place as the World´s Best Presentation in the year 2010, shows some facts and statistics about the cigarette industry and how smoking affects the environment and people in general -focusing on teenagers

SMOKE - The Convenient Truth

And here are some examples of campaigns that try to help people stop smoking.

Some cities in different countries in the world, are working in order to become tobacco-free places. Austin , Texas, the USA, is one of them and has launched a very strong campaign. They have a webpage where they upload videos of people telling stories related to tobacco -click here, if you want to hear any of those stories - and they have released some very powerful videos, like this:

The following campaign is called "I Bet you can Quit," for the American Cancer Society; it is a campaign that targets the friends of the smokers instead of the smokers themselves based on the following idea: if peer pressure makes people start smoking, it can also help them quit smoking. Thus, if many people started smoking because of peer pressure, their friends  could also make them quit. This is the video which shows how the campaign works:

The following one is my favorite. It is called "Chanting Lighter." It is campaign made for an Indian audience. 'Raam Naam Satya Hai' is chanted when a dead body is carried to the funeral pyre. This chant is synonymous with death. For the campaign, they designed a chanting lighter which played this death chant every time someone tried to light a cigarette. They put these lighters at cigarette shops in place of regular lighters. The message was so clear that many smokers were totally shocked, so much so that some of them decided not to light their cigarettes there and some of them even threw the cigarettes away. 

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Some anti-smoking campaigns are really hard, especially those which show how smoking can damage your body. Click here to know what I mean. 

As you can well imagine, tobacco companies are not happy with these campaigns and, in fact, five of them have sued the FDA (= Food and Drug Administration in the USA) over the law that forces them to show graphic health warnings on their cigarette packets. Read more about it here. 

Now it is your turn to say what you think about all this:

• do you think anti-smoking campaigns really work? 
• which one of those shown in this post is the most useful, from your point of view? why?
• if you were in my place, would you have shown the videos that explicitly show to what extent some bodies are damaged by smoking? why (not)?
• what is the best anti-smoking campaign you have ever seen -not only here, but in magazines, newspapers, television...? why have you chosen it?
• what do you think about the idea of smoke-free cities?

If you want to see my former entries about the celebration of non-tobacco day, find them searching for the dates in the months of May in the past.