We have several public service announcements on television and radio that tout literacy, prostate health, littering, etc. Remember, "Give a hoot, don't pollute"? Well, that was big in Washington state where I grew up. Anyway, why aren't there any public service announcements detailing the dangers of smoking. The stop smoking movement that began in the 1960's was very effective and cut the smoking prevalence rates by almost half to today's current levels of just over 20% of the US population. But we have hit a plateau. It seems that there has been no more head way made in the last decade.
Meanwhile, people continue to die at staggering rates due to tobacco use. The World Health Organization describes it as a worldwide epidemic. Unfortunately, there is a direct correlation between education and smoking prevalency rates. It seems the less education you have, the more likely you are to smoke. That little fact, translates across the world as developing countries have extremely high smoking rates compared to the more developed countries.
Governments and nonprofits have tried to tackle this problem from a number of angles. They now spend millions in offering stop smoking help, but is it well spent? What happened to being direct with the public? If we were to have the old fashion TV spots detailing the horrific effects of smoking, then wouldn't it be more widely debated, not just from podiums, but from living room easy chairs and sofas across the land? I'm not that big on spending money just to spend money, but in this case, it could save tax payers lots and lots of money. Consider this, smoking related healthcare costs exceed $190 billion. That's "b" for billion. That's Medicare, lost wages, lost productivity, that's making you wait at the doctor's office because too many other people are there too, because they smoked.
Imagine if you would, a world where nobody smoked cigarettes. People often wonder what it would be like if we had a cure for cancer. Well, stop smoking and you'll get rid of 90% of all lung cancer cases! Stop smoking and COPD (emphysema) would almost be non-existent.
I think back to our founding fathers who basically started the tobacco industry and all that it implies. I give them a lot of credit for settling in the Americas and all that, but wow, did they set us up for decades of poor health and death with this tobacco thing.
A recent survey came out stating that young people were not aware of any dangers associated with smoking. Somewhere, we've lost the messaging of the late 60's and early 70's. We need to rebrand that message and get it into living rooms across the world. So kids can ask their parents why they smoke if it's so bad for them. Or parents can use the ads as jump-off's to discuss the dangers of smoking to their kids. Let's get the prevalence rates to below 10%. Then we'll be talking about some real healthcare reform.
