by Conny Manero

Created on: June 30, 2008   Last Updated: July 06, 2008

Should tobacco advertising be permitted?
I would like to answer that question with a question.
Should alcohol advertising be permitted?

According to the statistics:

alcohol is the number one drug problem
alcohol is involved in 50% of all driving fatalities
every thirty minutes someone is killed in an alcohol related accident
56% of students in grade 5 12 say that alcohol advertising encourages them to drink

up to 40% of all industrial fatalities and 47% of industrial injuries can be linked to
alcohol
in domestic violence, 3 out of 4 incidents were related to alcohol
no less than 15 million Americans are dependent on alcohol and it is noted that
500,000 of them are children between the ages of 9 and 12.

The list goes on and on.

Interesting to note is that the liquor industry spends almost $2 billion on advertising.
On the other hand, alcohol and alcohol related problems is costing the American economy at least $100 million in health care.

Now let us look at another question. Should junk food advertising be permitted?

On a daily basis the American public is fed images of juicy burgers; tantalizing hot-dogs; succulent pizzas; and any number of other of fast foods. One cannot miss them. These advertisements come to us through television, magazines, billboards etc. and are costing billions.

The advertisers apparently do not take into account that two-thirds of the American population is overweight, of which one-third is obese. Neither do they take into account that junk food leads to high cholesterol; leading to high blood pressure; resulting in heart attacks and ultimately death. The death of no less than 2,300,000 people per year.

Some will argue that the use of tobacco is responsible for an equal amount of deaths. After all, the cigar and the cigarette are blamed for heart attacks and strokes.
The tobacco industry is also blamed for millions in health care services.
But are those facts and figures true?

I decided to do some field work and took a job at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto (CAMH), where I worked for a professor affiliated with the University of Toronto.
I was asked to feed the computer numbers for a spreadsheet, which would then be turned into a bar chart to be published in their annual report.
The spreadsheet showed a staggering number of people who died every year as a result of smoking.

"How do you get these numbers?" I asked the professor.
"We take the amount of people that died last month in Ontario," he said. "We take 80% of that number as people

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