Showing posts with label smoking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label smoking. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

On Fear Appeals

By now it should be apparent that I do a lot of random ebay shopping; I found this sometime yesterday and thought it was actually more disturbing than "funny," as the item was described.

 source: eBay

It coughs and screams when you smoke to remind you to quit.

Ok, we get it, smoking is bad. But is it really that bad that you have to market products to leave a phycological scar on a smoker?

I'm not really a smoker myself, but I find this to be going a bit far on the fear appeals front. No one who smokes thinks it is good for them, and yes maybe if you are going through a carton a day you should slow it down a bit, but people have been smoking for hundreds and hundreds of years - no amount of 'smoking is evil' compaining to rid the world of all cigarettes is going to stop everyone. And I'm sure there are some things you could do to your body that are far worse than having a smoke every now and then.

That was kind of on the ranting side, wasn't it? What do you guys think about this?