31st October, 2008
Today, of all days, sees the launch of another “stop smoking” shock TV advertising campaign. Let’s hope that the shock, which the advert no doubt delivers, does not get drowned out by all the other little scares that Halloween traditionally brings.
The ad shows various scenes such as “the dark”, as spider, a (more or less) sinister clown and a bully along with the voice-over of a little girl stating that none of these things scare her. At the end of the clip the girl’s mother, a mum-next-door type, turns around to look and smile at the girl while taking a big drag on a cigarette. Here the girl says that she is scared of her mum dying.
See the clip here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7701244.stm
It is, it must be said, a very effective bit of film making, if to shock is what the aim was. The ad is aimed at parents, and is said to be the result of studies of children and their concerns. Many children will also watch it and one can only speculate what effect it will have on them. But that is for another debate.
In the short term, smoking parents will watch the clip and the vast majority will feel a certain amount of guilt. A smaller proportion will feel an undefined and swiftly forgotten-about compulsion to quit. An even smaller proportion will actually act on that compulsion and stop smoking. Unfortunately many of these will fail. A few will succeed and give up smoking for good. And for them, surely, the campaign will have been successful.
If these campaigns are evaluated from a public health policy perspective however, it is very much debatable whether they represent value for money. The truth is that only a small number of people will permanently quit as a result of this campaign.
While the government and organisations such as ASH continue to hold the lofty ambition of getting people to stop smoking altogether, in other corners the attitude to public health policy seems to be shifting. Pragmatism is informing this school of thought. Why not admit that a substantial proportion of smokers will simply not be able to give up their nicotine addiction? Once that premise is accepted, the search for a means of satisfying the smokers’ need for a nicotine-hit safely can begin. The readily available and established nicotine patches (Niquitin) and gums (Nicorette) work by delivering a constant low dosage of the drug. Many smokers find this unsatisfying, as they do not get the instant hit that cigarettes give.
The astonishing electronic cigarette may well be a solution to the problem. In this device nicotine is electronically vaporised and then inhaled by the smoker, much like with a traditional cigarette. The difference is that the vapour contains only nicotine and neither the tar nor any of the thousands of other chemicals that a typical cigarette deposits in a smoker’s lungs. And these are what makes smoking so dangerous, not the nicotine itself. So with this clever gadget the user gets both the nicotine-hit and all the other “touchy-feely” sensations that smoking gives, without putting his health at risk.
