Smoking warnings - Scare tactics will help to save lives

Irish smokers are due to be bombarded with graphic images designed to scare the smoke out of them in the New Year.

Forty-two gruesome photographs are due to appear on cigarette packages in an effort to remind smokers of the dangers of the habit.

It has long been recognised that smoking tobacco kills. More than half a million people die in the EU each year as a result of smoking and it imposes an added cost of about €100bn on health services.

The new initiative is really an effort to redress the damage done by years of glamourising tobacco in movies and the visual advertising in newspapers, magazines and television. The disgusting photographs are to be put on cigarette packages in this country.

The images are deliberately designed to shock, with graphic depictions of diseased body parts like rotting lungs and throat tumors, as well as a young man in a mortuary.

It is fitting that Ireland’s EU Consumer and Health Commissioner David Byrne is playing the lead role in advocating this experiment, which has already been tried with some success in Canada.

Many former smokers there attribute their decision to quit to the advertising campaign.

This country was the first to ban the advertising of tobacco back in the late 1970s and it was also the first country to outlaw smoking in all indoor places of work. For too long smoking was depicted as sophisticated and glamorous, instead of being a dirty and deadly habit.