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 who died from smoking and multiply that figure by 12."
"But who says 80% of those people died of smoking?" I asked. "They could have died of something else. Every day people die of natural causes; in car accidents; stress could have been the cause of a heart attack; alcohol could have been a factor in a stroke. Unless a coroner performs an autopsy, how can you ever be sure what a person died of?"
The professor gave me a cold hard stare.
Refusing to back down, I voiced some opinions of my own.
"Couldn't it be that the American way of life is killing people?" I asked him. "After all, people work far longer hours here in North America than they do in Europe, in far more stressful conditions. In Europe millions of people smoke, yet lots of them grow old and live in good health. Couldn't it be that the American way of living has something to do with the American way of dying?
The professor shook his head. "We don't care what caused someone's heart attack or stroke," he said. "According to CAMH every heart attack and every stroke is caused by smoking, regardless of the true circumstances. A person could have died from a head on car collision, and if the police find cigarettes in the car, the cause of death is noted as smoking."
"But that is misleading the public," I argued. "That is lying! And if you lie about one thing, you lie about another. You discredit the whole research issue."
The professor turned on his heels and went into his office.
That same night I received a phone call from the employment agency I worked for with the notice that my assignment was terminated.
My consultant would not tell me what the reason was, but I had a fairly good idea I had asked too many questions.
This whole episode stayed with me though. If the Centre of Addiction and Mental Health is lying to the public about the facts and figures regarding smoking, than what other research can we label as lies or at least exaggerated? Are the alcohol related figures correct? Are the weight problem figures true?
Regardless of what is true and what is a lie or exaggerated, in my opinion it is high time that people stop blaming tobacco as the source of all evil.
Just how many people give smokers a dirty look, while they bite in their grease dripping burger and take slug of their alcoholic drink?
Sources:
http://www.drug-rehabs.org/alcohol-sta tistics.php - http://www.americansportsdata.com/obesityresearch.as p