Irrelevance Glorified

(note : originally written in 2000)

If you have been watching TV at all lately, you will have no doubt seen “The Truth” ads that air quite frequently. As a result of the numerous lawsuits brought against “Big Tobacco”, they are forced to fund anti-youth smoking commercials that will show us the error of our ways. Sure, information is good. And sure, underage smoking is bad. But these commercials serve nothing but to piss me off and I think they will be effectively uneffective in discouraging teen smoking. More disquieting is my suspicion that they will undermine any progress we have made in combating youth smoking.

My basic gripe was with a series of commercials where they attempt to bring relevancy to the chemicals that are within cigarettes/cigarette smoke. One commercial starts with security camera footage of a men’s bathroom (which in itself is rather creepy) and a man relieving himself at a urinal. The man looks down in the urinal and notices that there are words written on the “urinal cake”. The camera does a closeup to focus in on the words.

The connotation, of course, is that you are essentially putting pee in your mouth. Of course, this argument is incredibly ludicrous. Urea is a compound that is commonly found in chemistry and biology. You can buy it from any chemical reagent dealer, and it is not produced from urine. It’s just a chemical. By the same argument, we could say:

“Evian contains water. Water is also in your pee.”

And promote some sort of boycott on dihydrogen oxide, a dangerous industrial solvent that also happens to be a major component of acid rain. It doesn’t take much to see the idiocy of this argument. Subsequent commercials tell us that cigarettes have chemicals in common with dog poop, i.e. another fallacious argument along the same lines. Another offensive commercial is one where two young men enter a department store with some sort of liquid filled backpacks on, trying to give away samples of their produce “Ammonia-Ade”. Their argument is that ammonia is added to cigarettes, and according to the tobacco corporations it is added to “enhance flavor”. So TheTruth takes it to the logical & ludicrous extreme where these two guys are trying to give away what I assume is “pure ammonia” to drink. Well, I deal with “concentrated ammonia” in the lab — which is only about 15 normality — and its enough to knock you out. But a much reduced concentration is used in many household cleaning products and is pretty safe to work with. So TheTruth would have you believe that since something concentrated is quite unappealing, it must also be unappealing in small concentrations. They might as well say something like “Well, the Nazi’s smoked cigarette’s, so if you want to be like a Nazi you should smoke cigarettes.”

One of the big problems that I see is that one does not have to be a master logician to see the stupidity of these arguments and the associated commercials. You just have to be reasonable. These commercials, combined with the irritating hit-me-over-the-head-with-your-stupid-point “All Smoke High” commercials, makes me want to smoke purely out of spite. There are (many) legitimate reasons not to smoke, but these will never get through if teenagers start to realize that anything and everything coming from The Truth is utter bullshit. So I implore The Truth to rethink their attitudes and stop wasting money.

Update (4/08/03): A few months ago, directed me to a statment from the the American Lung Association. Apparently, the ALA thinks the ads are effective, and so does the reader. Well, I suppose they are entitled to their opinion. However, their main argument as to the effectiveness of the ads is that “Big Tobacco” is protesting them. I don’t know about you, but I would rather have some sort of scientific analysis, at least a poll or something that could give me numbers rather than rhetoric.