New gory images to jolt smokers to quit

The Straits Times-Home, pg H4, Sat june 3 2006

Soon cigarette packs will be packaged with new and more gory images on the front to deter people from smoking. I feel that this move to jolt smokers to quit has both its pros and cons. The good side of it is that there will be smokers who will be put off by the gory images and think twice about smoking. I believe that those who smoke for fun and are not die-hard smokers will be deterred from smoking when they see the images on the cigarette packs, as they would not want to risk their lives and would rather give up smoking which is something that they are not so addicted to and dependent on. However this move of putting new gory images has its downside to. Die-hard smokers will not really be disturbed by the images as they are probably used to seeing so many campaign pictures and slogans saying how smoking can kill you, and so they ignore it, some might paste stickers to cover up the images and thus continue to buy cigarettes. Some of these die-hard smokers have little children at home and when they leave their cigarette boxes lying around at home their children might come across the gory images and be frightened by it. And these images might comtinue to linger in their minds and haunt them as the children are so young and probably get scared easily. Therefore i believe that to put new gory images on cigarette boxes it not that effective in jolting smokers to quit and also not a great idea as everyone even little children are exposed to seeing the images.