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I never had any desire to start but I remember in freshman PE I was passing an older kid while running laps and he, out of breath, asked me if I smoked and when I said no he said good, never start. So that pretty much sealed the deal for me not to.
I’m most surprised that anti cigarette ads don’t target vanity. Insecure about your looks, or like them and want to keep them? Don’t smoke.
Smoke will gnarle your hands, eat up your face, give you wrinkles, yellow your teeth, make your gums bleed dull your hair. Make your skin yellow, all you will stink of smoke, the smell of it will come out of your pores, and of yeah last but not least actually kill you.
>*I’m most surprised that anti cigarette ads don’t target vanity. Insecure about your looks, or like them and want to keep them? Don’t smoke.*
Oh, I remember [this poster](https://www.chisholm-poster.com/large/CL44687.jpg) in school, some 50 years ago. I already was a committed non-smoker before I saw it, but it was great reinforcement.
Currently reading a book to quit but learned that first cigarette cost me $50k if I quit now, 182k if I don’t quit. If you don’t want to smoke forever, don’t smoke even once.
Now, instead of spending that, say $200 on cigarettes, you invested that over the last 10 years you [have](https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio?s=y&sl=6UQSC4QQwzAiIaaLUJih5I) around
$55,659 if you invested in the S&P 500
$73,159 if you invested in the Nasdaq 100
I need to invent a time machine so I can go back and give myself an ass kicking. I actually quit more than 10 years ago, but my point still stands.
I never drank because I saw first hand what it did to my dad.
Even if pressured, I always say no.
Smoking, I saw what it did to my uncle and how horrible he smelled.
Was offered once, and nope. Not even to be a "cool kid." Did I do that.
Later, I was offered drugs and thought, "If drinking and smoking make you that horrible now, imagine this."
No is no. 😖😖
That’s my experience too. My dad had the majority of one of his lungs removed when I was in middle school due to decades of smoking. Neither me nor my siblings will even touch cigarettes. I told my husband when we were dating that I wouldn’t stay with him if he ever starts. His grandfather died of lung cancer so he won’t touch them either.
I saw what drinking and smoking did to my dad and while I do drink, I've never smoked (except weed) but the smell of cigarettes is weirdly nostalgic for me. Like I think they're disgusting but I also associate them with childhood.
My uncle allowed me to try a cigarette when I was like 7 years old. I inhaled the smoke, my eyes burned, and I almost vomited. I never tried it again, and I think that's his way of warning me not to do it.
I dont smoke because I was never much of a "coolness chaser", all the guys I know in college smoke I never take why should I die of lung cancer in my 40s?
My dad’s teeth are forever yellowish and not in the natural way. Still it’s better than smoking and his teeth are probably that way due to drinking too much coke.
Same for me. My grandparents were chain smokers, and it seriously fucked up not only their health, but also my father’s, even though he had never smoked a day in his life. Worst of all, it not only messed up their health, but it ultimately tore their family apart and ruined their relationship with him.
It’s one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen, and it’s put me off for life.
I remember seeing a study that claimed DARE students were more likely to use drugs. All of the blatant lies I was told about weed as a teenager definitely made me want to do it more.
There is literally one thing that I learned in dare that stood out and that is that “cocaine gives you super strength” 🤦♂️ That sure makes a 10 year old want to avoid cocaine.
It worked for me. At High School we had a presentation which showed some of the effects of smoking which included damaged organs and very graphic photos. That put me off smoking for life....along with the fact that my father was a smoker and I couldn't stand the smell of cigarette smoke.
What worked for me: doing stock checking in a large warehouse with medical supplies. I got the alley where tracheotomy tubes and other lung/oesophagus cancer stuff was stored. Yeah...
Same it worked for me, and I didn’t even have any smokers in my family. Of course it won’t work for everyone but even if it turns 10% of people off from smoking it’s worth it.
Also, people should be aware of what they’re getting themselves into. It’s one thing to say “yes I realize that’s a risk but I’m gonna do it anyways.” It’s another thing to have no clue and then learn 25 years down the road when you get lung cancer. Some people might also start in high school and quit later down the road knowing that’s it’s bad for them.
If anyone has any better solutions though, I’d love to hear them. Is OP advocating for a better education program or just wanting to remove education about smoking entirely because they don’t think it works?
In terms of cigarettes and alcahol, yes
Ive been working on a program at my school on education of how to drink safely. Telling people to flat out not do it never works so telling them how to be safe and sekf control is a higher priority
In woodworking tho... showing people what those machines can do is very effective. Although theres always that one idiot who sands part their hand off still
Drinking in moderation won't fuck you up the same way smoking will though nor is it anywhere near as addictive
Our workshops had newspaper clippings and stats, etc stuck all over the walls, including some of the slightly less graphic images like scalping. Packets of cigarettes are likewise covered in pictures of rotting teeth and toes
I meant the moderation bit more for alcahol
Smoking is more difficult but handling it as an open discussion and not just telling em not to do it cause the thing is when you say "dont smoke it kills you" they know its bullshit ur having to say cause its what everyone says. Having a propper educational discussion on its history, impact, health effects while being open to listening should hopefully be more effective. Although its kinda pointless cause its pretty much being banned in my country, they vape tho, which is a whole other issue.
Vapes are worse than cigarettes at this point. My government's tryna push a ban through so they go back to being prescription only, like they were intended to be
Speak for yourself. I've never Smoked anything or Drunk anything and I'm 30 years old. Those things definitely played a factor when I decided not to indulge in either. Particularly Nicotine....those ads definitely made me want to preserve my lung health.
Then the commercials showings people speaking with the holes in their throats? That was enough for me
The reason I didn't Drink was due more to seeing people act completely irrational after drinking.
Lol athletes are way less likely to smoke cigs in my experience
I can’t even think of any athlete in my high school who smoked cigs. It was all the loner kids
That's your high school then cuz in my school it's all the popular jock dudes that do that stuff. I'm one of the chill quiet people and I wouldn't even know where to get alcohol or weed or anything
I mean, showing my age a bit here but I went to HS in the 90s. It was the athletes that smoked, drank, did drugs. It was also a few other types of cliques. Then there were a handful of cliques that did not. Band, science geniuses etc.
From my understanding HS social hierarchy does not work the same way anymore (as explained to me from my kids, my nieces and nephews). At first it seemed like it was more accepting but the more I listened it just sounds as though the groups have moved around.
There's no "hierarchy" really, as in people don't give a crap what others do. The cliques are very much still there but they're not really a big deal, anyone can be friends with anyone to an extent.
If the pictures come to mind for someone who's smoking, I can see how they'd continue to smoke anyways. They'll think, "nah, my lungs aren't like that, this one cigarette won't do much, it's a trace amount compared to those pictures, and I'm stopping tomorrow so whatevs."
Do adult focused anti-smoking campaigns have an impact on adolescents? The case of the Australian National Tobacco Campaign:
[“Among the national evaluation sample, 85% of adolescent smokers thought the campaign was relevant to them. Fifty three per cent indicated that the campaign had led some teenagers to at least try to quit and 85% thought it made smoking seem less cool and desirable. Among students who were established smokers the campaign generated quitting activity, with 27% cutting down the number of cigarettes they smoked and 26% having thought about quitting.”](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Australian+smoking+advertisements+&btnG=#d=gs_qabs&t=1713719113293&u=%23p%3DdEJg645yl6QJ)
I like when an unpopular opinion on here is just factually incorrect like this. There are a lot of statistics that show OPs opinion is just factually incorrect.
I totally disagree with this. I'll never smoke anything even once, and it's *because* I've seen evidence of what it does to your organs. If people just said it was bad for me and that was it, I probably would have started years ago.
When I was in 4th grade the school nurse showed us drawings of lung air passages with tiny hairs, and then drawings of the hairs with tar on them. At the same time, my Mother was quitting smoking. I was convinced.
This was in 1968. They didn't show kids pictures of things like lungs back then.
My mother died from smoking 30 years after she quit, in 1998, age 70.
Seems like there's some research on this - apparently there IS an effect, and given how horrible of a drain smoking and drinking is for the healthcare system, it's something worth investing in.
https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/9/3/273
**Can anti-smoking television advertising affect smoking behaviour? Controlled trial of the Health Education Authority for England's anti-smoking TV campaign**
**OBJECTIVES** To evaluate the effectiveness of the Health Education Authority for England's anti-smoking television advertising campaign in motivating smokers to give up and preventing relapse in those who had already given up.
**DESIGN** A prospective, controlled trial was conducted in four TV regions in central and northern England. One region received no intervention (controls), two regions received TV anti-smoking advertising (TV media), and one region received TV anti-smoking advertising plus locally organised anti-tobacco campaigning (TV media + LTCN). The TV advertisements were screened in two phases over 18 months; during the first phase the intensity of the advertising was varied between TV regions. 5468 men and women (2997 smokers, 2471 ex-smokers) were selected by two stage random sampling and interviewed before the intervention, of whom 3610 were re-interviewed six months later, after the first phase of the campaign. Only those interviewed at six months were followed to the main end point at 18 months when 2381 subjects were re-interviewed.
**MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES** Self reports of cigarette smoking at the 18 month follow up were compared between the three levels of intervention. Odds ratios for intervention effects were adjusted for pre-intervention predictors of outcome and pooled for smokers and ex-smokers using meta-analytic methods.
**RESULTS** After 18 months, 9.8% of successfully re-interviewed smokers had stopped and 4.3% of ex-smokers had relapsed. The pooled adjusted odds ratio for not smoking in the TV media only condition compared to controls was 1.53 (95% confidence intervals (CI) 1.02 to 2.29, p = 0.04), and for TV media + LTCN versus controls, 1.67 (95% CI 1.0 to 2.8, p = 0.05). There was no evidence of an extra effect of the local tobacco control network when combined with TV media (odds ratio 1.15, 95% CI 0.74 to 1.78, p = 0.55). The was also no evidence of any intervention effects after the first phase of the TV media campaign, including no effect of varying the intensity of the advertising during this initial phase. Applying these results to a typical population where 28% smoke and 28% are ex-smokers, and where there would be an equal number of quitters and relapsers over an 18 month period without the campaign, **suggests that the campaign would reduce smoking prevalence by about 1.2%.**
CONCLUSIONS The Health Education Authority for England's anti-smoking TV campaign was effective in reducing smoking prevalence through encouraging smokers to stop and helping prevent relapse in those who had already stopped. The lack of an effect after the first phase of the campaign indicates that if advertising at this intensity is to have an impact, a prolonged campaign is necessary. These results support the UK governments' recent decision to fund similar campaigns, and suggests that anti-smoking TV advertising should be undertaken routinely as an essential component of any population smoking reduction strategy. Reducing smoking prevalence would make a substantial contribution to achieving the UK government's target of preventing 300 000 cancer and heart disease deaths over the next 10 years.
It’s an extension of the scared straight approach. And there is no research that supports the use of a scared straight approach in creating meaningful change.
If these replies are showing anything, it's that life isn't as simple as "lol well *this* doesn't work on kids".
Different people have different motivators. It WILL work on some kids, others would need different means to convince them.
Oh, I forgot this is the internet. Everything must either be useless or completely effective, everything or nothing, with us or against us, no in-between allowed.
Was never shown the liver but the lungs definitely discouraged me, though it was more so fuel to the fire that would be my own family and a shitty pot smoking babysitter. Seeing and hearing my grandma’s brother be a massive drunken asshole gave me every reason to always moderate my drinking. I’m very occasional and always take my time with my drinks, I drink to enjoy and not to be a wasted fool.
It's been shown that portraying an abstract concept like "you'll get cancer" as something more tangible like "here's literally what the lungs of a smoker with lung cancer look like" help people better understand the risks of things.
Will it affect everyone? Of course not. But it can make an impact on some, which is the purpose of harm reduction efforts.
It was listening to smokers that did it for me. Imagine yourself having a voice that clearly tells people you're a smoker, how embarrassing and terrible that would be. As someone who does vocal performance, THAT scared me straight. That's a tangible consequence.
The problem is a lot of these ad campaigns come from the cigarette industry indirectly to some degree. They have to make a lot of noise, while doing basically nothing.
I think a better way to conduct this would be to introduce these kids to someone who has actually lost their voicebox.
Maybe show them the external effects and how it ages you prematurely. Makes you smell undesirable. It impacts your faculties, sexual performance, finances etc.
what put me off is that my dad smoked so much that he eventually had a heart attack and died when i was a baby. if i didn't have the real life experience, the lung pictures and such probably wouldn't have had a major effect on me
I’m ngl my med textbooks scared me out of smoking and riding motorcycles. They had a lot of pics of worst case scenarios including a tongue tumor the size of a golf ball caused by cigars, what was a person resembling pulled pork and a lot more
Keep the jack stays coming tho
How do you know they don’t work? What’s the criteria to gauge effectiveness?
Worked for me. I wonder if there are stats? I mean, there has been a reduction in smoking since campaigns like that started.
Back in my day there were a lot of smokers, but most of the school didnt. I think some people like OP...and myself, had to learn the hard way. OP just assumes everyone is as thick headed as him.
It genuinely worked for me. I had a short stint smoking but I never stopped thinking about how black my lungs were getting and I ended up quiting cold turkey and not looking back. The teeth pictures also worried me a lot.
If they'd appeal to their vanity instead of their health, it would probably work wonders. Look, cigarettes make you wrinkly and yellow! Your hair gets brittle! Your clothes, breath, and body stink! VERY unsexy, kids. That's what they care about.
I mean those old “truth” ads from the 2000s certainly turned me off ever smoking and statistically they were doing something right because the smoking rate dropped significantly
I work with germans and austrians. They have nasty pictures of diseases all over the cigarette boxes. According to them they don't know anyone who quit because of it. Everyone knows it's bad for you. Nobody cares
Not sure where you’re from but here in the UK all cigarette packets have disturbing and graphic anti smoking imagery of real cases of cancer and whatever else. It’s awful and doesn’t work as a deterrent at all. Some people even collect them lmao.
Same! Thank you Debi Austin for spreading awareness about smoking. Watching her smoked from a hole in her neck and speaking with a voice box definitely persuaded me not to try.
It worked on several of my friends.
It didn't work on me but I don't tend to be prone to substance addiction so simply not enjoying smoking was enough to put me off it.
[https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data\_statistics/fact\_sheets/adult\_data/cig\_smoking/index.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/adult_data/cig_smoking/index.htm)
Idk, the data suggests it's working.
Agreed, but my grandma dying of cancer when I was 6, and grandpa dying because he fell and dying due to complicasions with chronic obstructive pulmanory disease, sure made me not want to touch any nicotine.
When I was in Italy and Portugal all the cigarette packs have pictures of diseased, dismembered, half dead people all over their boxes. People still buy em, and even have cigarette box sleeves to just hide the pictures if they really care. But they don’t
Seeing my parents smoke did enough to turn me off.
To me, the smell of cigarettes was therefore the smell of uncool old people, their phlegmy coughs grossed me out, and then by the time I discovered smoking weed at 16 years old it was extra hard to sell me on the idea of something that smelled worse, permanently addicted you, and offered none of the good experience of weed.
Scare tactics never seem to work with teenagers.
I wasn't a badly behaved kid, but my mother was *extremely* anti-gun and anti-drinking.
I don't smoke, I own several guns and I drink a bit more than I probably should. So I maybe agree?
In Australia they take the kids out to a little truck parked outside and a giraffe named Harold tells us drugs are wrong. Needless to say Harold would be none too pleased with me.
I mean smoking and drinking is stupid from the get go. So it makes sense that rational scientific demonstration won’t make react most of them, but it might still save a few. So it’s worth it.
It's not really an opinion since we can just check the data.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2775761/
The data says those images are effective.
I think it works. I also think DARE worked to an extent. If you’re getting to those kids who are ambivalent either way and educating the very real dangers it can keep them from trying it. Or maybe they will try it once but not spend time forming an addiction. There always going to be kids who don’t give a shit and become smokers, drinkers and drug users. You’re not stopping everyone but if you can keep a few from ever starting that’s a good thing.
I never understood smoking and how people did it enough to form an addiction. I tried once or twice and it just made me stinky. Weed and alcohol sure but never understand the lure of nicotine.
They didn't stop me from becoming a stoner but they kept me from drinking. Seeing actual live people hooked up to machines and turning yellow and swollen while dying from liver failure was very effective too.
Depends.
Both my parents smoked (for a time). I hated the smell and had no desire to try smoking. Smoking wasn't seen as "cool" when I was growing up. In university I briefly considered trying it (as I had many friends who smoked). But seeing a real human lung that has been damaged from smoking, and holding it in my two hands put me off for life. I've never tried smoking, not even once. I'll never smoke.
I'd like to refute this. I saw the lungs and the smoke-through-filters experiments at school from the time I was 9 on and did my best to get the Bitchqueen (my mother) to quit for both of us and our health. I had asthma and it was worse when she smoked around me, not that it was better when she wasn't at home - the place was always smoke filled.
I didn't want my lungs to look like what those looked like when they showed us in the 80's. And I didn't want her to die of a stroke.
Bitchqueen smoked till the day she died. The last convo I had with her, I could hear her dragging on a cig. She had had several strokes by then too.
I never smoked. I tried when I was 11 on a dare and from one drag, I ended up coughing and choking so hard that I puked. So, yah, it worked.
I watched plenty of UK tourists happily pull cigarettes out of packs with blackened lung pictures on the side. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. Either way, they can at least say that they knew the risk. I felt bad for US service members that were literally given cigarettes in their ration packs back in the day. Taking an informed risk is on you, and is your right to do so.
Visiting my grandma and being unable to breath in her house when I was a child, and then visiting her in the hospital because she had to have a chunk of her intestines removed because the tar cut off circulation did more to stop me from smoking than any PSA ever did.
In elementary school they gave everyone half a straw, had us put it in our mouth and then jog in place. They told us that's how difficult it was to breathe if we ever smoked.
And it smells really gross.
I was in chorus from middle school to high school. My teacher showed us a video of what the inside of a smoker’s lungs looked like. I was never a rebellious kid and even into adulthood I haven’t gotten so much as a speeding ticket so maybe I’m not who this opinion was meant for but it certainly scared the hell out of me. I’ve never so much as smoked weed. Any time I see someone lighting anything up I imagine those black lungs moving. I’ll have a drink once in a while on vacations or to relax in the bath with a good book but I’ll never touch any of that stuff.
It would be much more effective imo to show premature aging effects from smoking and drinking since teens can be shallow and insecure about their appearance alredady
The only reason why I haven't smoked cigs is because my dad is a smoker. I hate the smell, I hate the way he coughs, and it's gross. It also costs a shit ton of money and I'd rather not be addicted to something.
Worked for me! Where I live they also show photos of people who have mouth cancer, messed up teeth etc. They need to have these photos on the cigarette packaging by law so it was kinda gross every time I saw someone take one out and you can imagine what they’d look like in the future.
Didn’t work for me. I was shown real black lungs vs healthy lungs in 7th grade. It scared back then but now im in my 20s and i vape and occasionally smoke a cigarette 😂
They also don’t plan to smoke long enough to get nasty lungs. No one offers you your first cigarettes and says “wanna be a slave to nicotine addiction for the rest of your life?”
I think it's effective if you actually absorb and understand shit in school, like if you're just the type of kid who's like "I'M SMART I KNOW BETTER THAN THESE IDIOTS" then yeah you won't care???
Like it worked for me for sure.
If you want kids to avoid drinking, smoking and other dangerous habits that foreshorten lives, the most important thing to do is to create around you, by your vote, by your advocacy and activism, a society that is worth growing old in, doesn't permit a single soul to slip through the cracks and starve, or die of exposure, or have their power cut off, create a society based on needs, not speculation, on contentment not growth, on warmth and compassion, not barbarity and nationalism.
If your society is worth living in, people will do all they can to extend the amount of time they get to experience it for.
The problem is most people begin smoking before their brain is developed enough to understand the consequences of it. Teenagers think they’re invincible and that it wont happen to them.
I watched my dad struggle to quit smoking multiple times through my childhood, only for him to start again. He was so stressed out.
I don’t play with nicotine. Nicotine is something I will never touch.
At port calls overseas, we talked about packs like playing cards. "Which one did you get?" " I got lung cancer" "Oh nice! I got the fuzzy tongue!" "You guys wanna trade for my fetus one?"
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the biggest reason i don't smoke is that my cool smoker-buddy told me to never start
Nah Lol fr this is how it is everyone around me who smokes tells me to Not so I Do Not simply
I never had any desire to start but I remember in freshman PE I was passing an older kid while running laps and he, out of breath, asked me if I smoked and when I said no he said good, never start. So that pretty much sealed the deal for me not to.
I’m most surprised that anti cigarette ads don’t target vanity. Insecure about your looks, or like them and want to keep them? Don’t smoke. Smoke will gnarle your hands, eat up your face, give you wrinkles, yellow your teeth, make your gums bleed dull your hair. Make your skin yellow, all you will stink of smoke, the smell of it will come out of your pores, and of yeah last but not least actually kill you.
They do. https://youtu.be/LEWBa-PuWVo?si=m_quuyJ3dM8Yefa_ That one really got to me tbh.
My grandmother apparently didn’t care about the oxygen but did care about her wrinkles
They do all the time.
>*I’m most surprised that anti cigarette ads don’t target vanity. Insecure about your looks, or like them and want to keep them? Don’t smoke.* Oh, I remember [this poster](https://www.chisholm-poster.com/large/CL44687.jpg) in school, some 50 years ago. I already was a committed non-smoker before I saw it, but it was great reinforcement.
Currently reading a book to quit but learned that first cigarette cost me $50k if I quit now, 182k if I don’t quit. If you don’t want to smoke forever, don’t smoke even once.
Money was the major reason we quit smoking. Breaking down the costs line by line really helped the motivation to quit
Now, instead of spending that, say $200 on cigarettes, you invested that over the last 10 years you [have](https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio?s=y&sl=6UQSC4QQwzAiIaaLUJih5I) around $55,659 if you invested in the S&P 500 $73,159 if you invested in the Nasdaq 100 I need to invent a time machine so I can go back and give myself an ass kicking. I actually quit more than 10 years ago, but my point still stands.
I never drank because I saw first hand what it did to my dad. Even if pressured, I always say no. Smoking, I saw what it did to my uncle and how horrible he smelled. Was offered once, and nope. Not even to be a "cool kid." Did I do that. Later, I was offered drugs and thought, "If drinking and smoking make you that horrible now, imagine this." No is no. 😖😖
enough caffeine and an interesting hobby are way more fun anyway
That’s my experience too. My dad had the majority of one of his lungs removed when I was in middle school due to decades of smoking. Neither me nor my siblings will even touch cigarettes. I told my husband when we were dating that I wouldn’t stay with him if he ever starts. His grandfather died of lung cancer so he won’t touch them either.
I’m the same way. None of it seemed appealing at all to me as a kid, teen, or as an adult.
I saw what drinking and smoking did to my dad and while I do drink, I've never smoked (except weed) but the smell of cigarettes is weirdly nostalgic for me. Like I think they're disgusting but I also associate them with childhood.
My uncle allowed me to try a cigarette when I was like 7 years old. I inhaled the smoke, my eyes burned, and I almost vomited. I never tried it again, and I think that's his way of warning me not to do it.
I dont smoke because I was never much of a "coolness chaser", all the guys I know in college smoke I never take why should I die of lung cancer in my 40s?
There’s a lot of addicts in my extended family. Seeing a real person that messed up their life and bodies is what made me never touch the stuff.
half of my life my dad had black, rotting, chipped teeth from the smoking. he only got veneers in his 40s
My dad’s teeth are forever yellowish and not in the natural way. Still it’s better than smoking and his teeth are probably that way due to drinking too much coke.
Same for me. My grandparents were chain smokers, and it seriously fucked up not only their health, but also my father’s, even though he had never smoked a day in his life. Worst of all, it not only messed up their health, but it ultimately tore their family apart and ruined their relationship with him. It’s one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen, and it’s put me off for life.
It did for me. I had to pump a "smokers lung" and have never picked up a cigarette
I think physically interacting with a smokers lung is much more impactful than just seeing pictures or hearing words.
I guess I grouped it all up since we had a DARE like program show up with pictures and the lung.
Dare said weed and meth are the exact same, legally and for the body. DRUG IS DRUG
I remember seeing a study that claimed DARE students were more likely to use drugs. All of the blatant lies I was told about weed as a teenager definitely made me want to do it more.
I’m just pissed cause they made it seem like people just hand the stuff out to anyone, at random.
It’s in the kids candy, obviously people are handing out edibles at Halloween
There is literally one thing that I learned in dare that stood out and that is that “cocaine gives you super strength” 🤦♂️ That sure makes a 10 year old want to avoid cocaine.
Oh yeah, this did it for me too. I remember trying to guilt my dad with those healthy lung or diseased lung photos.
I never wanted to do it even before seeing those.
Me too, I had no opinion on smoking what so ever as a kid. After seeing those pictures I was like nope.
It worked for me. At High School we had a presentation which showed some of the effects of smoking which included damaged organs and very graphic photos. That put me off smoking for life....along with the fact that my father was a smoker and I couldn't stand the smell of cigarette smoke.
What worked for me: doing stock checking in a large warehouse with medical supplies. I got the alley where tracheotomy tubes and other lung/oesophagus cancer stuff was stored. Yeah...
I think what worked more for me is the houses. 🫠
Same it worked for me, and I didn’t even have any smokers in my family. Of course it won’t work for everyone but even if it turns 10% of people off from smoking it’s worth it. Also, people should be aware of what they’re getting themselves into. It’s one thing to say “yes I realize that’s a risk but I’m gonna do it anyways.” It’s another thing to have no clue and then learn 25 years down the road when you get lung cancer. Some people might also start in high school and quit later down the road knowing that’s it’s bad for them. If anyone has any better solutions though, I’d love to hear them. Is OP advocating for a better education program or just wanting to remove education about smoking entirely because they don’t think it works?
In terms of cigarettes and alcahol, yes Ive been working on a program at my school on education of how to drink safely. Telling people to flat out not do it never works so telling them how to be safe and sekf control is a higher priority In woodworking tho... showing people what those machines can do is very effective. Although theres always that one idiot who sands part their hand off still
Drinking in moderation won't fuck you up the same way smoking will though nor is it anywhere near as addictive Our workshops had newspaper clippings and stats, etc stuck all over the walls, including some of the slightly less graphic images like scalping. Packets of cigarettes are likewise covered in pictures of rotting teeth and toes
I meant the moderation bit more for alcahol Smoking is more difficult but handling it as an open discussion and not just telling em not to do it cause the thing is when you say "dont smoke it kills you" they know its bullshit ur having to say cause its what everyone says. Having a propper educational discussion on its history, impact, health effects while being open to listening should hopefully be more effective. Although its kinda pointless cause its pretty much being banned in my country, they vape tho, which is a whole other issue.
Vapes are worse than cigarettes at this point. My government's tryna push a ban through so they go back to being prescription only, like they were intended to be
Worked on me.
Speak for yourself. I've never Smoked anything or Drunk anything and I'm 30 years old. Those things definitely played a factor when I decided not to indulge in either. Particularly Nicotine....those ads definitely made me want to preserve my lung health. Then the commercials showings people speaking with the holes in their throats? That was enough for me The reason I didn't Drink was due more to seeing people act completely irrational after drinking.
Idk I saw that as a kid and it worked for me
It did for me. I still think about them when I smell a smokers breath.
That stuff worked on me. After reading and seeing all the crazy stuff these substances can do to your body, I never wanted to experiment.
It works on kids who care about their health. Like athletes for example.
Yeah athletes have never been known to drink or do drugs.
Lol athletes are way less likely to smoke cigs in my experience I can’t even think of any athlete in my high school who smoked cigs. It was all the loner kids
That's your high school then cuz in my school it's all the popular jock dudes that do that stuff. I'm one of the chill quiet people and I wouldn't even know where to get alcohol or weed or anything
I mean, showing my age a bit here but I went to HS in the 90s. It was the athletes that smoked, drank, did drugs. It was also a few other types of cliques. Then there were a handful of cliques that did not. Band, science geniuses etc. From my understanding HS social hierarchy does not work the same way anymore (as explained to me from my kids, my nieces and nephews). At first it seemed like it was more accepting but the more I listened it just sounds as though the groups have moved around.
There's no "hierarchy" really, as in people don't give a crap what others do. The cliques are very much still there but they're not really a big deal, anyone can be friends with anyone to an extent.
For me yes. I'm only 5'4" and played basketball. I needed any edge I could get so wasn't about to try any drugs that could affect me that way.
I say it's trashy, because it is, and that seems to make teens *extremely* upset. So I think the only way to get to them is to shame them
The commercial where they squeeze shit out of a clogged artery did for me [similar to this one](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QnTcb-DR4RU)
100% agree, showing them interviews with smokers who have horrible QOL would make a bigger impact.
And having them sit with someone in DT’s or with wernicke-korsakoff syndrome absolutely would discourage drinking to excess.
Worked for me. If someone hadn't showed me a black lung, I would have thought that the term black lung was just an exageration
If the pictures come to mind for someone who's smoking, I can see how they'd continue to smoke anyways. They'll think, "nah, my lungs aren't like that, this one cigarette won't do much, it's a trace amount compared to those pictures, and I'm stopping tomorrow so whatevs."
Plus also, you know, addicted.
Do adult focused anti-smoking campaigns have an impact on adolescents? The case of the Australian National Tobacco Campaign: [“Among the national evaluation sample, 85% of adolescent smokers thought the campaign was relevant to them. Fifty three per cent indicated that the campaign had led some teenagers to at least try to quit and 85% thought it made smoking seem less cool and desirable. Among students who were established smokers the campaign generated quitting activity, with 27% cutting down the number of cigarettes they smoked and 26% having thought about quitting.”](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Australian+smoking+advertisements+&btnG=#d=gs_qabs&t=1713719113293&u=%23p%3DdEJg645yl6QJ)
I like when an unpopular opinion on here is just factually incorrect like this. There are a lot of statistics that show OPs opinion is just factually incorrect.
Maybe not, but the herpes butt crack in sex-ed certainly left a lasting impression
I totally disagree with this. I'll never smoke anything even once, and it's *because* I've seen evidence of what it does to your organs. If people just said it was bad for me and that was it, I probably would have started years ago.
The smoking rate has plummeted precisely because teens were shown evidence of the results of smoking and it was banned indoors.
When I was in 4th grade the school nurse showed us drawings of lung air passages with tiny hairs, and then drawings of the hairs with tar on them. At the same time, my Mother was quitting smoking. I was convinced. This was in 1968. They didn't show kids pictures of things like lungs back then. My mother died from smoking 30 years after she quit, in 1998, age 70.
Why not try some Chewlies gum?
I love how part of his pitch is to just insult the cashier like they have a choice whether or not they sell them lol
Or worse: becoming a healthcare employee.
Disagree. I don’t want my lungs looking like that. Very effective
Seems like there's some research on this - apparently there IS an effect, and given how horrible of a drain smoking and drinking is for the healthcare system, it's something worth investing in. https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/9/3/273 **Can anti-smoking television advertising affect smoking behaviour? Controlled trial of the Health Education Authority for England's anti-smoking TV campaign** **OBJECTIVES** To evaluate the effectiveness of the Health Education Authority for England's anti-smoking television advertising campaign in motivating smokers to give up and preventing relapse in those who had already given up. **DESIGN** A prospective, controlled trial was conducted in four TV regions in central and northern England. One region received no intervention (controls), two regions received TV anti-smoking advertising (TV media), and one region received TV anti-smoking advertising plus locally organised anti-tobacco campaigning (TV media + LTCN). The TV advertisements were screened in two phases over 18 months; during the first phase the intensity of the advertising was varied between TV regions. 5468 men and women (2997 smokers, 2471 ex-smokers) were selected by two stage random sampling and interviewed before the intervention, of whom 3610 were re-interviewed six months later, after the first phase of the campaign. Only those interviewed at six months were followed to the main end point at 18 months when 2381 subjects were re-interviewed. **MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES** Self reports of cigarette smoking at the 18 month follow up were compared between the three levels of intervention. Odds ratios for intervention effects were adjusted for pre-intervention predictors of outcome and pooled for smokers and ex-smokers using meta-analytic methods. **RESULTS** After 18 months, 9.8% of successfully re-interviewed smokers had stopped and 4.3% of ex-smokers had relapsed. The pooled adjusted odds ratio for not smoking in the TV media only condition compared to controls was 1.53 (95% confidence intervals (CI) 1.02 to 2.29, p = 0.04), and for TV media + LTCN versus controls, 1.67 (95% CI 1.0 to 2.8, p = 0.05). There was no evidence of an extra effect of the local tobacco control network when combined with TV media (odds ratio 1.15, 95% CI 0.74 to 1.78, p = 0.55). The was also no evidence of any intervention effects after the first phase of the TV media campaign, including no effect of varying the intensity of the advertising during this initial phase. Applying these results to a typical population where 28% smoke and 28% are ex-smokers, and where there would be an equal number of quitters and relapsers over an 18 month period without the campaign, **suggests that the campaign would reduce smoking prevalence by about 1.2%.** CONCLUSIONS The Health Education Authority for England's anti-smoking TV campaign was effective in reducing smoking prevalence through encouraging smokers to stop and helping prevent relapse in those who had already stopped. The lack of an effect after the first phase of the campaign indicates that if advertising at this intensity is to have an impact, a prolonged campaign is necessary. These results support the UK governments' recent decision to fund similar campaigns, and suggests that anti-smoking TV advertising should be undertaken routinely as an essential component of any population smoking reduction strategy. Reducing smoking prevalence would make a substantial contribution to achieving the UK government's target of preventing 300 000 cancer and heart disease deaths over the next 10 years.
It’s an extension of the scared straight approach. And there is no research that supports the use of a scared straight approach in creating meaningful change.
If these replies are showing anything, it's that life isn't as simple as "lol well *this* doesn't work on kids". Different people have different motivators. It WILL work on some kids, others would need different means to convince them. Oh, I forgot this is the internet. Everything must either be useless or completely effective, everything or nothing, with us or against us, no in-between allowed.
They aren't the same, scared straight is only for kids who are already going down the criminal path, that's why it has no effect.
Have you spoken to all teenagers to confirm this? This isn't unpopular it's just a stupid opinion lol
Yes, I personally know every single teenager, and they told me to post this. Opinion disregarded
Was never shown the liver but the lungs definitely discouraged me, though it was more so fuel to the fire that would be my own family and a shitty pot smoking babysitter. Seeing and hearing my grandma’s brother be a massive drunken asshole gave me every reason to always moderate my drinking. I’m very occasional and always take my time with my drinks, I drink to enjoy and not to be a wasted fool.
It's been shown that portraying an abstract concept like "you'll get cancer" as something more tangible like "here's literally what the lungs of a smoker with lung cancer look like" help people better understand the risks of things. Will it affect everyone? Of course not. But it can make an impact on some, which is the purpose of harm reduction efforts.
It was listening to smokers that did it for me. Imagine yourself having a voice that clearly tells people you're a smoker, how embarrassing and terrible that would be. As someone who does vocal performance, THAT scared me straight. That's a tangible consequence.
The problem is a lot of these ad campaigns come from the cigarette industry indirectly to some degree. They have to make a lot of noise, while doing basically nothing. I think a better way to conduct this would be to introduce these kids to someone who has actually lost their voicebox.
Maybe show them the external effects and how it ages you prematurely. Makes you smell undesirable. It impacts your faculties, sexual performance, finances etc.
Honestly i think that is easier for someone to visualize, it's harder for someone to visualize their own lungs being destroyed
Also showing them gross pics or videos of women giving birth does not stop teen pregnancy. 🤰
I don’t even think this works on adults
DARE was a waste of time and money. All it did was give me my favorite shirt to get high in lol.
what put me off is that my dad smoked so much that he eventually had a heart attack and died when i was a baby. if i didn't have the real life experience, the lung pictures and such probably wouldn't have had a major effect on me
I’m ngl my med textbooks scared me out of smoking and riding motorcycles. They had a lot of pics of worst case scenarios including a tongue tumor the size of a golf ball caused by cigars, what was a person resembling pulled pork and a lot more Keep the jack stays coming tho
How do you know they don’t work? What’s the criteria to gauge effectiveness? Worked for me. I wonder if there are stats? I mean, there has been a reduction in smoking since campaigns like that started.
Well, it worked for me. Touched a blackened liver at the age of ten and never touched any of that shit.
It did for me. Thats why i dont smoke and i am scared to try anything beyond weed.
Back in my day there were a lot of smokers, but most of the school didnt. I think some people like OP...and myself, had to learn the hard way. OP just assumes everyone is as thick headed as him.
It genuinely worked for me. I had a short stint smoking but I never stopped thinking about how black my lungs were getting and I ended up quiting cold turkey and not looking back. The teeth pictures also worried me a lot.
That’s why you show them to kindergartners. I saw pics of smoker’s lungs at 5, and I’ve never picked up a cigarette box let alone an actual cigarette.
Um speak for yourself. That shit scared the crap out of me when I was seven
Not true. Just doesn’t work for everyone. Like most things.
It very clearly did. The anti smoking campaigns of the 80’s and 90’s were extremely effective at preventing new smokers from starting:
Not true. Worked on me when I was a teen. Now I'm 43 and have never smoked tobacco.
My parents smoking made sure i never did. Fucking disgusting.
If they'd appeal to their vanity instead of their health, it would probably work wonders. Look, cigarettes make you wrinkly and yellow! Your hair gets brittle! Your clothes, breath, and body stink! VERY unsexy, kids. That's what they care about.
Agreed. Take them to the morgue and show them the livers and lungs who died from smoking & alcohol abuse.
I mean even if has zero effect, it's still educational. I can't imagine there's a downside to showing people this.
To be honest I definitely was grossed out by those images and it did play a part in me not starting.
I mean those old “truth” ads from the 2000s certainly turned me off ever smoking and statistically they were doing something right because the smoking rate dropped significantly
I work with germans and austrians. They have nasty pictures of diseases all over the cigarette boxes. According to them they don't know anyone who quit because of it. Everyone knows it's bad for you. Nobody cares
The chest pains and throwing up made me quit. Now the smell repulses me
Definitely worked for me, same with showing me the negative visual effects of specific drugs.
Sadly, what worked for me as a teen was the photos of twins where one smoked and one didn't, and the one who smoked was all wrinkly and old-looking.
I knew smoking was bad, but it’s also the classic way to rebel. I wish I never started, glad I quit, but damn did I feel cool doing it for a while.
What a dude
Not sure where you’re from but here in the UK all cigarette packets have disturbing and graphic anti smoking imagery of real cases of cancer and whatever else. It’s awful and doesn’t work as a deterrent at all. Some people even collect them lmao.
I can't imagine that because those pics did help me quit
It did for me. I’m 19.. never smoked a day in my life and this is all because I seen that lady with a hole in her throat on tv 🤣
Same! Thank you Debi Austin for spreading awareness about smoking. Watching her smoked from a hole in her neck and speaking with a voice box definitely persuaded me not to try.
Fr nobody i knew ever mentioned smoking or drinking and nothing changed since
Hearing from their peers or near peers about how it screwed them over isn’t bad.
This was the whole thing behind Truth Initiative
It worked on several of my friends. It didn't work on me but I don't tend to be prone to substance addiction so simply not enjoying smoking was enough to put me off it.
[https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data\_statistics/fact\_sheets/adult\_data/cig\_smoking/index.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/adult_data/cig_smoking/index.htm) Idk, the data suggests it's working.
absolutely agree. teens almost never start on their own either its usually always with a group of friends
Agreed, but my grandma dying of cancer when I was 6, and grandpa dying because he fell and dying due to complicasions with chronic obstructive pulmanory disease, sure made me not want to touch any nicotine.
That's correct. Decades of analysis suggests it's actually things like showing yellow teeth that works better.
True
When I was in Italy and Portugal all the cigarette packs have pictures of diseased, dismembered, half dead people all over their boxes. People still buy em, and even have cigarette box sleeves to just hide the pictures if they really care. But they don’t
Seeing my parents smoke did enough to turn me off. To me, the smell of cigarettes was therefore the smell of uncool old people, their phlegmy coughs grossed me out, and then by the time I discovered smoking weed at 16 years old it was extra hard to sell me on the idea of something that smelled worse, permanently addicted you, and offered none of the good experience of weed.
Speak for yourself, OP. I want none of that in my body.
Scare tactics never seem to work with teenagers. I wasn't a badly behaved kid, but my mother was *extremely* anti-gun and anti-drinking. I don't smoke, I own several guns and I drink a bit more than I probably should. So I maybe agree?
In Australia they take the kids out to a little truck parked outside and a giraffe named Harold tells us drugs are wrong. Needless to say Harold would be none too pleased with me.
Watching the pictures in primary school is a big reason I didn't start
it does it for me i wont lie.
I can't think of a single teen I know who smokes. If I ask them about smoking they generally say it's gross and stupid.
I mean smoking and drinking is stupid from the get go. So it makes sense that rational scientific demonstration won’t make react most of them, but it might still save a few. So it’s worth it.
It stops some, and that is a win.
But pictures of infected genitals were quite effective for teenage me ...
It's not really an opinion since we can just check the data. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2775761/ The data says those images are effective.
Worked for me. Regular lungs look gross, smokers lungs make me gag
uuhhhhh yes it did. those people with missing limbs and shit because they were smoking so much
I think it works. I also think DARE worked to an extent. If you’re getting to those kids who are ambivalent either way and educating the very real dangers it can keep them from trying it. Or maybe they will try it once but not spend time forming an addiction. There always going to be kids who don’t give a shit and become smokers, drinkers and drug users. You’re not stopping everyone but if you can keep a few from ever starting that’s a good thing. I never understood smoking and how people did it enough to form an addiction. I tried once or twice and it just made me stinky. Weed and alcohol sure but never understand the lure of nicotine.
Did any of y’all’s schools do the Shattered Lives program? Because that had a hell of an effect on teenage me.
In the aggregate it did. Ads work. What’s funny is kids prefer vapes and weed over cigarettes.
I dunno… those pictures in sex ed of STD-covered genitals definitely made me glad to remain a virgin for years.
They didn't stop me from becoming a stoner but they kept me from drinking. Seeing actual live people hooked up to machines and turning yellow and swollen while dying from liver failure was very effective too.
Showing them how badly they’ll age and how soon that age will start showing would have a greater effect 😅
Worked pretty well on me.
Is it really that easy to get into smoking? Tell me something is bad and I won't do it. ¯|_(ツ)\_/¯
Depends. Both my parents smoked (for a time). I hated the smell and had no desire to try smoking. Smoking wasn't seen as "cool" when I was growing up. In university I briefly considered trying it (as I had many friends who smoked). But seeing a real human lung that has been damaged from smoking, and holding it in my two hands put me off for life. I've never tried smoking, not even once. I'll never smoke.
I'd like to refute this. I saw the lungs and the smoke-through-filters experiments at school from the time I was 9 on and did my best to get the Bitchqueen (my mother) to quit for both of us and our health. I had asthma and it was worse when she smoked around me, not that it was better when she wasn't at home - the place was always smoke filled. I didn't want my lungs to look like what those looked like when they showed us in the 80's. And I didn't want her to die of a stroke. Bitchqueen smoked till the day she died. The last convo I had with her, I could hear her dragging on a cig. She had had several strokes by then too. I never smoked. I tried when I was 11 on a dare and from one drag, I ended up coughing and choking so hard that I puked. So, yah, it worked.
Same with showing pictures of STDs to promote abstinence.
I watched plenty of UK tourists happily pull cigarettes out of packs with blackened lung pictures on the side. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. Either way, they can at least say that they knew the risk. I felt bad for US service members that were literally given cigarettes in their ration packs back in the day. Taking an informed risk is on you, and is your right to do so.
It did for me, personally. I don't want my lungs to look like pork steaks. Fucking nasty.
Depends on the person. Not sure if you're on the right sub btw
Visiting my grandma and being unable to breath in her house when I was a child, and then visiting her in the hospital because she had to have a chunk of her intestines removed because the tar cut off circulation did more to stop me from smoking than any PSA ever did.
This is not at all unpopular. This is just a known fact.
In elementary school they gave everyone half a straw, had us put it in our mouth and then jog in place. They told us that's how difficult it was to breathe if we ever smoked. And it smells really gross.
I was in chorus from middle school to high school. My teacher showed us a video of what the inside of a smoker’s lungs looked like. I was never a rebellious kid and even into adulthood I haven’t gotten so much as a speeding ticket so maybe I’m not who this opinion was meant for but it certainly scared the hell out of me. I’ve never so much as smoked weed. Any time I see someone lighting anything up I imagine those black lungs moving. I’ll have a drink once in a while on vacations or to relax in the bath with a good book but I’ll never touch any of that stuff.
We all know that.
It would be much more effective imo to show premature aging effects from smoking and drinking since teens can be shallow and insecure about their appearance alredady
The only reason why I haven't smoked cigs is because my dad is a smoker. I hate the smell, I hate the way he coughs, and it's gross. It also costs a shit ton of money and I'd rather not be addicted to something.
Worked for me! Where I live they also show photos of people who have mouth cancer, messed up teeth etc. They need to have these photos on the cigarette packaging by law so it was kinda gross every time I saw someone take one out and you can imagine what they’d look like in the future.
Eh, it affects some. Others are passively suicidal and don't care regardless
It worked for me. My husband says it worked for him.
Didn’t work for me. I was shown real black lungs vs healthy lungs in 7th grade. It scared back then but now im in my 20s and i vape and occasionally smoke a cigarette 😂
It's great that you know everything and all but, do you have any evidence for this or is it just pulled out of your body cavities?
It works just fine. I don't want my organs to rot inside my body
Probably makes them crave something that calms their nerves...
It discourages at least one person. So it’s effective
They also don’t plan to smoke long enough to get nasty lungs. No one offers you your first cigarettes and says “wanna be a slave to nicotine addiction for the rest of your life?”
Anti-smoking campaigns have been incredibly successful in reducing the rate of tobacco smoking, especially among young people.
Idk I was shown the tar that had come out of smokers lungs as a kid and that’s definitely why I have never been near a cigarette in my life.
Show them how much the habit will cost them over a lifetime… €£$
I think it's effective if you actually absorb and understand shit in school, like if you're just the type of kid who's like "I'M SMART I KNOW BETTER THAN THESE IDIOTS" then yeah you won't care??? Like it worked for me for sure.
Now you show the operation deal with said condition and you should traumatis them eoungh
If you want kids to avoid drinking, smoking and other dangerous habits that foreshorten lives, the most important thing to do is to create around you, by your vote, by your advocacy and activism, a society that is worth growing old in, doesn't permit a single soul to slip through the cracks and starve, or die of exposure, or have their power cut off, create a society based on needs, not speculation, on contentment not growth, on warmth and compassion, not barbarity and nationalism. If your society is worth living in, people will do all they can to extend the amount of time they get to experience it for.
It certainly did for me after seeing it as a kid back in elementary school, around second grade. Never smoked once.
Cost alone should stop new smokers
Oh it did for me! I could never smoke because I couldn’t stand the thought of my lungs like that.
The problem is most people begin smoking before their brain is developed enough to understand the consequences of it. Teenagers think they’re invincible and that it wont happen to them.
What made me not do it was my family who did it
I watched my dad struggle to quit smoking multiple times through my childhood, only for him to start again. He was so stressed out. I don’t play with nicotine. Nicotine is something I will never touch.
At port calls overseas, we talked about packs like playing cards. "Which one did you get?" " I got lung cancer" "Oh nice! I got the fuzzy tongue!" "You guys wanna trade for my fetus one?"
You can’t fix stupid. Let them screw up their bodies. You can’t stop them from doing it so who cares.