In the article "Cigarette Ads: A Matter of Life" Ellen Goodman writes about banning cigarette ads. She states that prohibiting cigarette ads is not the perfect way to stop the millions of active smokers around the United States from using tobacco, but could be a first step towards helping the next young generation stay away from this enslavement. She insists that the idea of forbidding tobacco ads is the more polemic one on the road to limiting or eliminating the use of cigarettes. She develops her thesis saying that banning cigarette ads won't have an effect on banning other products (alcohol, fat, automobiles) because smoking is the only truly destructive one. Moreover, she underlines how inconsistent the message is in the tobacco world. She believes that cigarette ads send a fake message of sophisticated style, and notes specifically the hypocritical situation of those who want to ban the ads on cigarettes are those that let the market continue to sell them; the latter appearing to be the truly immoral one.
I took this photograph.
cigarette
cigaretteAfter reading the above article I was astonished thinking how ingenuous people can be. I completely disagree with the author's arguments. Looking at my experience, as a smoker and an Italian witness of the censorship on cigarettes ads in my own country, I believe that forbidding those ads has no true outcome or effect on stopping people from smoking.
Despite the fact I understand the concerns of the author, in her article Goodman doesn't present convincing arguments. The opinion that tobacco is the only item that "when used as instructed is destructive" appears to be a superficial judgment and is completely false. We don't know if smoking three or five cigarettes for fifty years is really destructive, we know that people smoke too many cigarettes a day, and this overusing...