The Problem Is Right Under Your Nose

First of all, there have been requests by a couple of my readers for a pictoral representation of my nose after I made several unflattering references to it a couple posts ago.

Well, since I do whatever you whackjobs want, here it is:

Satisfied?

Good. Now we can all move on with our lives.

Sheesh.

Attention all black-lunged bastards (that may have been Mulder's greatest line ever, by the way) the Food & Drug Administration is soon going to be in charge of overseeing cigarette companies. I can just see Benson & Hedges quaking in their boots.

"Oh, no! Not the FDA! We're so scared to be regulated by the same people who lord over Centrum Cardio and Tucks Medicated Pads!"

Maybe, though, those mothafuckas should be scared.

The new regulations that are being set up aren't going to bode well for the tobacco industry, whose once-powerful lobby apparently needs a dose or two of Levitra these days. The colorful and large displays that right now grace the local CVS and Walgreens will soon be gone, replaced by black & white text-only advertising. The warning labels will now be even more ominous than before, and every single ingredient will have to be listed. (I wonder if the cigarette boxes will now have to contain calorie counts and sodium levels.) Warnings on cigarette boxes will now take up 3/4ths of the entire box, leaving no room for Joe Camel, the Marlboro Man or Betty White or whomever they've got advertising ciggysticky these days.

Also, stores that are located 1000 feet away from a school won't be able to advertise that they sell cigarettes. Bummer.

Here's the thing: this is all window-dressing, and I guess that's why Big Tobacco isn't sweating its leaves about this too much. All of these new regulations don't change the fact that an addictive product is being peddled to people who are already hooked. It wouldn't matter if cigarette packets just bore the word "DEATH" in 36-point font. It just doesn't matter. If you think people who smoke crack don't know it's going to kill them, um, then you probably haven't smoked crack lately.

I was at Rite-Aid this morning and the woman in front of me wanted a pack of Benson & Hedges Premium Filter. The hen-pecked, blue-vested clerk was having trouble locating that particular iteration of cigarette. There were Benson & Hedges Special Filters, Benson & Hedges Deluxe Ultra Lights, Benson & Hedges Golds, Benson & Hedges Gold 20s, Benson & Hedges Menthol Milds. But this crackhead wanted her Premium Filters, and her knuckles were turning white as she was gripping onto her car keys with enough force to cause herself an aneurysm or stigmata. I thought she was going to pop a gasket when, finally, the clerk found her goddamn cancer-twigs. Praise be.

At another drug store this morning (I was running errands for work-- hey, at least I wasn't wasting away in front of the Xerox machine at Staples) I stood behind a grammaw who had just purchased a carton of cigarettes. Like most addicts, she was a regular at her locale of choice. Had she been a heroin addict, this pharmacy would be her street corner. An alkie, her Cheers. The clerk addressed her by name and advised her to, "Watch out for that heat out there" and encouraged her to, "take care of yourself."

After selling her the equivalent of slow-release TNT-- watch out for the rain? Take care of yourself? Why bother with such niceties? I would have said, "Why don't you try the Guns & Ammo shop down the street and save yourself a lot of time?" But I don't work at a drug store, and there are no guns & ammo shops where I live. There are, however, gourmet pet food boutiques and high end automobile accessory shops.

I think people who smoke should be allowed to do whatever the hell they want to themselves, but I don't think we as a society should be tricking ourselves into thinking that anything we do is going to make a damn bit of difference. Trying to scare the bejesus out of smokers with warnings like, "Smoking Will Turn Your Unborn Baby into Adam Sandler" or "Smoking Cigarettes is About as Intelligent as Sucking on a Hog's Anus" or "Stop Smoking, All the Girls Think You're a Fucking D-Bag" just doesn't work. Seriously, FDA: scaring people doesn't work. If people scared easier, nobody would fly on airplanes, get in elevators, attend NASCAR races, pick their scabs, or fuck girls from Des Moines.

This just in: People Don't Scare Easily-- They're Too Dumb.

The only thing that motivates people is money so, until a pack of cigarettes costs $187.50, we're still going to have an assload of black-lunged bastards running around our college campuses and our sidewalks. I'd love a society where only people with Oprah-sized bankrolls could afford to smoke habitually. Frankly, we could do with a few less multibillionaires.

So let's just forget about trying to scare people, okay? Let's just insult them. I want to see legislation passed enabling the FDA to require cigarette manufacturers to emblazon cigarette their cigarette packs with

"YOU'RE A DUMB TWATLICK. GO SMOKE ON THAT."