The FDA is betting on the shock factor to convince roughly 45 million Americans to give up smoking.
Nice idea, but while fear is a great short-term motivator it can't be the bedrock of sustained lifestyle changes.
We've already proved that.
In September of 2001, this country pulled together across political and racial lines to combat the bogeyman that visited fear on us, not via shadows under our beds, but with hijacked airplanes.
Most of us were willing to endure anything in the immediate aftermath to make the fear subside. Now? We are more concerned about inconvenient airport patdowns than another terrorist attack, and are as politically polarized as we've ever been.
Some comprehensive sex education and health classes present color photos of the grotesque things that result from STDs, including cold sores in sensitive areas and deformed, ill-colored genitals. Students are usually grossed out - but later give in to the overwhelming force of teenage hormones.
Talk show hosts bring on medical professionals carrying disgusting see-through plastic bags of actual human fat during segments designed to spur more people to embrace dieting. It may cause some of the audience members to skip a burger later that day but doesn't stop them from gorging on junk food the next.
The list of failed scare tactics is long, including the shockumentary "The Living Hell" shown in some evangelical churches, like the one in which I grew up. Among other things, it includes a scene with an unrepentant motorcyclist's brain matter scattered on the pavement after an accident but before he could be "born again," relegating him to an eternity of hell fire, as a warning to all to choose what the filmmakers believe is the right path.
Drug dealers in this area have seen friends shot down in the street like dogs but are convinced they won't meet the same fate.
If scare tactics were successful, we would post a photo of a girl being raped and a young man being handcuffed on every keg and beer bottle sold near a college campus because alcohol abuse is the primary factor in most date rapes.
Or put a picture of a 700-pound man in bed, trapped by his own body and soiling himself on the wrapping of every McDonald's Double Quarter Pounder.
The Food and Drug Administration's new anti-smoking campaign that calls for gruesome new labels covering half the surface of cigarette packs in 2012 may earn a few headlines. And it may inspire columnists, such as those who write for thisnewspaper, to ponder their pros and cons.
But it won't work. Studies from other countries already using similar tactics have shown that smokers briefly think more about quitting or the dangers - then light up another cigarette any way.
Smokers already know the risks. They know they are increasing the chances that their lives will be taken too early and painfully. They may not know the number of people who die in the U.S. every year from smoking - about 450,000 - but they know it's a lot.
Fear doesn't motivate smokers for the same reason the death penalty doesn't curb crime.
There's too much lag time in between the events - smoking and death and a crime and an execution. Design a cigarette so powerful that after one puff, the smoker keels over or instantly gets cancer, now that would get their attention.
Short of that, unless a smoker commits to the belief that his life and the impact of his actions on those he loves are more important than a coffin stick, nothing will deter them.
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