Cigarette Advertisement
Over the years, cigarette smoking has been transformed from a fashionable thing dangling at a person’s lip to an all-out addiction, rivaling that of alcohol and drugs in many people. It has been known to cause certain forms of cancer and aggravate lung conditions like bronchitis; it is even said that cigarette smoking can cause emphysema. So if cigarette smoking is out there killing people, what has society done about it? While certain measures have been taken, such as restricts on certain types of cigarette advertisements, Marlboro cigarette ads and Kool and Winston cigarette ads still appear in ladies magazines every day, and they are still proudly broadcast on the outside of party stores and grocery stores around the nation.

In their right mind, who blames so many people for flocking to the part of culture that thinks that cigarette smoking is fashionable and cool, when in all actuality it has been scientifically proven to cause deadly diseases in some people. Cigarettes take lives everyday, yet still cigarette advertisements are clearly a large part of the advertising industry as it is and not everybody’s best interests have to do with putting a halt to these ads.

In response to this, there have been some modifications to cigarette advertisements. First of all, Joe Camel is no longer a spokesperson for the cigarette industry any more. Joe Camel was becoming a bigger and bigger deal to the kids everyday, becoming nearly as recognizable as Mickey Mouse--and that is a huge deal. After all, children do tend to idolize those cartoon characters that they associate with and if they see their big cartoon friend Joe Camel puffing on a Camel cigarette, that looks like the cool thing to do. Of course it’s not right, and critics say not to blame the advertisers and that society just needs to teach its children better than to be so impressionable but that is not always as easily done as it is said.

The truth is that whether it be through a friend who saw cigarette advertisements on television or a child who saw one of them firsthand, children learn more from each other than any adult would like to know and cigarette advertisements can often create false pretenses of coolness, or the fact that cigarette smoking is a perfectly healthy and normal habit when it is not.

While so much legislation is brought to mind to reverse the restrictions on cigarette ads, the fact remains that they shed a falsely positive light on the dangers of cigarette smoking.