Smoking

Over the last few days I've repeatedly been getting in my mind the visual of a smoker struggling to quit smoking crushing a full pack of cigarettes in his hand. It comes from a series of government PSAs against smoking that regularly aired a few years ago. I don't know why I've been thinking of it, considering I've never been a smoker. Thinking about this has led me to wonder if the visual of a full pack of cigarettes being crumpled made smokers who saw it anxious / uncomfortable / irritated and made them want to go smoke a cigarette.

Now all the commercials on TV about smoking are advertisements for various products to help people quit smoking, and the Last Thing In The World they would ever show is a person struggling with the very difficult task of overcoming nicotine addiction. Instead they have a small, unrepresentative sample of people relating their success story of how they quit smoking using that particular product, ignoring the fact the small percentage of people who do manage to quit smoking were probably so dedicated doing so that they would have been able to quit smoking using just about any of the various major methods they now sell.