Plain Label Cigarette Packaging….. Well plain if you don’t count the images of dead people and diseased limbs plastered all over them.

Okay yes, I confess, I am a smoker.

And yes I know it’s one of the stupidest, most self-destructive things that a person could possibly do for their health …….

And yes I know that cigarette smoking is, now or less these days , being portrayed as the one and only form of self-induced harm that causes our health care system millions of dollars…….

And as a response to this the government have introduced new laws mandating the use of plain label packaging for cigarettes in the hopes that people,  who can no longer buy ‘their brand’ of cigarette,  will quit……..

Yeah right…. Like that’s going to happen!!!!

So to further impress upon us that smoking is currently the greatest evil in our society, these so-called “plain labelled packages” also come complete with graphic, and I do mean graphic, images of diseased lungs, limbs, eyes, pre-term babies, and  even pictures of dead people, just to show us how stupid we all are for smoking.

Now I don’t mind the idea of ‘plain label packaging’ for cigarettes, but what I do mind is being forced to purchase a product with such horrible imagery on it. In fact, I mind it very much and I hate that my children are also being exposed to the graphic imagery on the packaging.

So I ask you, what’s “plain label” about forcing purchasers to have to view such graphic and disturbing imagery simply in order to buy a product that our government seems so reluctant to withdraw from sale yet at the same time is so keen to keep sucking  the tax dollars from?

If smoking is really that big of a blight on our health care system, then why don’t our governments simply shut the cigarette manufacturing companies down or make it illegal to purchase, sell or consume cigarettes?

Furthermore, if you’re going to mandate plain label restrictions on legal drugs like tobacco, then why not do the same for alcohol, which provides just as big, if not bigger headaches not just for our health system but also for our police force?

Why doesn’t a bottle of Whiskey have to come complete with pictures of cirrhosis of the liver, cars wrapped around trees, cemeteries, or graphic depictions of the loss of limbs caused through drink driving accidents?

Tobacco isn’t the only drug that has a habit of killing the people who consume it.

Though it seems to me that we are all of sudden being expected to believe that this is so,

And that drinking copious amounts of alcohol is an innocent past time with absolutely no broader health consequences at all for  our wider society, our health system, our court system  or the individual drinkers  and their families who become caught up in a web of drug abuse far more insidious than cigarette smoking could ever be.

Yet, if drinking is so innocent a past time, then why do we have entire sections of our police force dedicated to catching “drink drivers”, providing “booze buses”  or spending hour after hour patrolling night clubs and the streets around them for those who are committing acts of drunken violence?

When was the last time you heard of a person causing a fatal car crash because they’d had too many cigarettes before they got behind the wheel of a car?

When was the last time you heard of someone starting a brawl in a public place because they’d smoked too many cigarettes, too quickly?

When was the last time you heard of the police being called to attend a domestic violence scene because a man had too many cigarettes, lost control and stated beating up his wife and children?

These are all situations that our police force and indeed our ambulance and health care workers are being forced to deal with because of the use and abuse of alcohol.

Yet alcohol manufactures and consumers are not being forced to endure the horribly graphic imagery that is now adorning cigarette packaging.

So shouldn’t we be asking why this is so?

As far as I’ m concerned alcohol abuse poses a much greater and immediate threat to our youth than cigarette smoking ever will.

Yet it’s cigarette smoking that our governments have chosen to come down hardest upon, whilst allowing the alcohol industry to continue it’s free reign over our society.

Does anyone else view the way our governments are dealing with the scourge of tobacco whilst ignoring the multiple costs of alcohol abuse as a double standard the way that I do?

Related articles

• EU to outlaw cigarette packet branding by ‘the back door’ (telegraph.co.uk)