Slashdot Mirror
Leonard Nimoy: Smoking Is Illogical
An anonymous reader writes "My boyhood hero, actor Leonard Nimoy,
has developed lung disease. To those still smoking and in the grips of marketing induced denial, he says 'quit now.' Small acts of goodness make the universe a better place."
Perhaps in the distant past smoking marketers claimed smoking was safe, but I never saw any sign of that... they simply make smoking glamorous while glossing over the dangers, but it's not like they actively hide the dangers.
Was 1977 the distant past? I know lots of people who used to write for womens' magazines, such as Ms. They got half to 3/4 their advertising from cigarettes, and they wrote about every every cancer except lung cancer. They depicted women smoking cigarettes as glamorous. And Ms. magazine directed itself to teenage girls, and gave them a model of how to act.
Now, those same teenage girls who became addicted to cigarettes because Ms. magazine told them it was cool, are now getting lung cancer and all the other cigarette-caused diseases, like the COPD that Nimoy has.
Nor is it the case that any person who smokes does not know the danger at this point. There are millions of sources telling you smoking is bad. People do things they know are bad for them for whatever reason; that will never stop and it's unfair to blame marketing for human nature.
When you have people in cigarette marketing who spend millions of dollars trying to figure out how to get people to smoke cigarettes even though it's bad for them, and succeed, then I think it's fair to blame them for getting people addicted on cigarettes.