> Doug wrote:
>
> Or in life, cigarettes. It's precisely their danger that some people find
> attractive.
> And the more they're demonized, the more people, especially younger people,
> are drawn to them. The attraction has nothing to do with the reasonable
> evaluation of risk/reward ratios. They're a way of flirting with death.
> This is something that public health professionals and mental hygienists
> don't understand.
>
> -------------------
> I don't know about mental hygienists, are they like Milton Friedman?, but
> the public health professionals I know and work with do understand it.
Here in California it is very well understood. The cigarette-tax funded anti-cigarette campaign is very savy at countering this, including ads that look slick, have noir overtones, and show the tobacco companies attempting to play kids for fools.
The effectiveness of these ads can be seen in that (1) they initially drove down smoking rates among teens (2) Pete Wilson responded by interferring with & cutting back spending on this ad campaign. (3) After this teen smoking rates began rising again.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"