WTF Photos. Will they make you stop smoking?

To the FDA;

What the fuck, honestly. I mean... Come on, really? You mean to tell me that photos are the new way of making people stop smoking? I recently browsed all the pictures that you are deciding on using (click at the name of the post) and selected my favorites, from my Holy Shit reaction gauge.

Let me start from the beginning. These photographs suck beyond belief. You are the government! These look like 50 buck photos from some random Royalty Free Stock site! Can't you come up with decent lighting or better retouching than that???

This is absurd to the point of truly moronic! I know you are trying to let people know WHAT THEY ALREADY KNOW, but there's got to be a better way than this. You are wasting my money, dammit, on a shit design and shit photography - um yeah, I pay taxes, I get to give you my opinion on this artwork. In fact, today I am the client. And trust me, I really don't like what I see.

You want to do something of value, with all the money you are probably wasting on this? Do a PrimeTime Special, each month, on the dangers of smoking. Get back to the typographical squares, just make them a little bit more bigger and do social programs that actually might be seen and understood by people.

Increase the shit out of their taxes. Want a smoke? Pay 20 bucks for a box. People - gasp - can afford an $8-10 pack already. If you want people to stop smoking and you just cannot convince them with hard core stories about death and cancer, then hit them where it hurts the most. Money.

Information is the key to solving the smoking problem. But then again, people who smoke TOTALLY know what they are doing. They know the dangers, they know what is at stake. They are just betting that they are not going to be the ones with the problem. Basically, smoking is betting that you are not going to kill yourself. Do they worry? Yes. Do they know all that the government and special independent programs have done to warn them? Yes. Do they care if they die? YES! Will they stop smoking based on these designs with photographs? My bet is not likely.

Does this mean that we need to stop doing all that we can? No way. Dying is no joke, specially when you are doing it to yourself, slowly. But the only real way that smoking can be stopped is by going into extreme detail of the true consequences of inhaling and exhaling smoke - mixed, sad to say, with EXTREME TAXES. The government needs to make smoking hurt when it comes to paying. When we start seeing $25 cigarette boxes, trust me the numbers will go down.

The sad thing is that all these cigarette companies are so rammed up the government's ass, paying shitload after shitload of campaign donations, we'll never see those kinds of ideas made into law. And more people will die.

How sad.