Cigarette displays may soon be a thing of the past
So the coalition has done it again – it’s taken away more fun. Not content with pricing people out of university and setting a minimum price on alcohol, now it’s trying to further ruin smoking too. Life’s little pleasures are going down the pan –or more specifically to The Man.
Under new legislation, tobacco products will be hidden away under shop counters, while companies may also be made to manufacture cigarettes in plain, unbranded packets.
The theory behind this is that if people can see cigarettes, they’ll want cigarettes. By the same logic, would fruit sell more if you put it directly behind the counter? No, of course not. People don’t want fruit. They want those lovely and horrible little sticks that make you feel all warm inside.
Aside from putting cigarettes on the naughty step, or shelf, as it may be, the proposal to enforce plain packaging seems a touch pointless. I can’t remember every minute I’ve ever spent in a newsagents, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never stood there buying a magazine and thought “You know what? I really like the typography on that pack of fags, gimme a twenty of Marlboro Lights!”.
All very well for a semi-intelligent 20 year old, but children are impressionable. Think of the poor children! You know, the children who are most probably far more interested in Milky Bar Buttons than in peering over the counter to work out what brand they’re going to buy into in ten years’ time.
In reality, all it’s going to do is make the cashier’s job harder when they’re fumbling on a dark shelf trying to find an unmarked packet. Besides, if people can’t get want they want from the corner shop, there will always be shady market stalls and friends who can help out.
It’s insulting to think that the government assume that people will stop smoking if they can’t see tobacco products. Insulting, not only because they’re assuming that we’re too thick to have free will, but also because we actually were thick enough to vote in a government that thinks so little of us.
At best, the legislation will have little to no effect. At worse, hiding products will make them more desirable. The more you’re told you can’t or shouldn’t have something the more appealing, the more exotic, it becomes.
Effective or not, where does it end? Maybe chocolate will be hidden too because it encourages childhood obesity. In fact, let’s go all out: let’s make newsagents like Argos stores, so that you can’t see any item that might tempt you to do the naughty things.
Everyone knows smoking is bad. If you’re a regular, heavy smoker, it’s no mystery that you’re probably going to die a nasty death. And if you don’t? Well, Mr Cameron, you and your tea boy had better get onto improving education.
I could help, if you like. I’ll lend you my granddad so you can show young people what lung diseases do to you.
If you want to discourage people from smoking, show them an old man who can’t talk for wheezing, and has to be put on medication that gives him hallucinations. Show them the man who said, lying in hospital hooked up to numerous machines, “I regret it all now.”
