Scary Smoking Warnings Can Be Accidentally Cool

Online, November 19, 2010 (Newswire.com) - Earlier this week the Food and Drug Administration unveiled proposed warnings for cigarette packages in the U.S. In place of the current Surgeon General's Warning, which politely taps smokers on the shoulder to whisper about risks about tobacco related diseases. These graphic labels, which would occupy half of the package's surface area, shout that you are going to die. That's the idea, anyway. There's the nice-looking man in a suit lying in his coffin, the emaciated, ambiguously gendered hospital patient gasping for life, the still-alive but fairly grotesque man, post-tracheotomy, blowing smoke through the hole in his neck.

Of the thirty-six proposals, some are graphic (a Tetris-style cigarette pack and gravestone icon with an arrow from the former to the latter), some evoke comic books (a man injecting a cigarette into his arm as though it's a needle bearing heroin, with the words "WARNING! CIGARETTES ARE ADDICTIVE" in a comic-book-style font), and some strive for realism. When photography is employed, it's more likely to make you cringe for being cheesy than for being gruesome: a woman sobbing; a stone-faced man with a shaved head pulling apart his outer shirt, Superman-style, to reveal a T-shirt that says "I Quit"; a man blowing smoke in a woman's face with the oversold, defiant pucker of the villain in an after-school special.

And school-aged kids are part of the target audience. The New York Times writes that "every day, about 1,000 children and teenagers become regular smokers, and 4,000 try smoking diferent cigarette brands starting from Winston Cigarettes or Bond cigarettes for the first time." (The statistic raises the question of at what point one crosses over from being a novice smoker to a "regular"... when the bodega worker knows your order?) That points to another problem: the illustrations, though less snicker-worthy than the photographs, carry the risk of being cool.

Tim Jacobus, who illustrated the covers of the "Goosebumps" series for a decade, is an expert on freaking out twelve-year-olds, and he worries that these drawings might have the opposite effect. "The illustration style, there's an appeal to that," he told me. "Kids may be, like, 'that's kind of gruesome, but it's cool, I'm going to hang on to this.' "

Gahan Wilson, who does his share of creepy illustrations, including for this magazine, says these drawings are "coddling" smokers. Wilson believes in the power of scary imagery (his rule of thumb: "if it scares you it's going to scare them"), but, as a former smoker, thinks the F.D.A.'s warnings would be more effective as straight text. "The extreme thing" to do, he says, would be to write, in the style of a poison warning, "Caution: contents will cause cancer," and leave off the drawings. "Words are much more to the point," he says.

That has been the approach in other countries, where cigarette packages must bare bold, Helvetica warnings about the risks, which seem to vary, by country, in severity and likelihood. In London "smoking kills"; in Spain it "can kill"; in Nicaragua it "seriously harms"; and in Ireland it "can damage the sperm." But in all, the message is clearer than that of a comic-book arm getting injected with a cigarette.

If images are to be used, Jacobus and Wilson agree that they need to be grosser. "Go after the fact that smoking is rather disgusting," Wilson suggests. "That would up the ante." And run with it: "Exaggeration is what makes all the difference in the world," Jacobus says. "A set of fangs or an evil eye or something like that-you're trying to push that, make that as extreme as possible."