I showed them gruesome pictures of a blistered and festering lip.
No effect.
How about a gray, curdled lung, marbled with black streaks?
Not a cringe among them.
“Okay, how about this one?” I flipped through my manila folder, past the gangrenous foot, the degenerated eyeball and the grayish, waxen corpse.
Here it is: a sweet, innocent baby, squinting in a cloud of secondhand smoke.
Shrug.
So much for shocked straight.
I got this ho-hum response while prowling the smoke-break alleys of downtown Washington this week, showing folks photos that governments think might encourage them to quit smoking.
We looked at ones that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is requiring on all cigarette packs by fall 2012 — a rotating series of graphic images warning of the dangers of smoking. There is a blackened mouth with sores, smoke wisping from a tracheotomy hole, emotional photos of babies and mothers crying.
The baby photo did nothing for Phyllis Wilder, who was on a cigarette break from her job as an office manager on K Street.
“How about your own baby? What if her face was on the warning label on your cigarettes?” I asked Wilder.
“You know, she’s been asking me to quit for years. And I’m going to. Really. I’m really going to quit,” said Wilder, who is 50 and has been smoking since she tried her first cigarette at 16.
“I’ve tried quitting so many times. But really, I’m going to do it for her now. She’s 14. And this time, I’ve gotta do it,” she said, as she’s said many times before.
Nah, someone else’s baby isn’t going to make her quit any faster when even her own kid’s face isn’t enough to slay the addiction.
I know. My dad smoked for 40 years. My brother and I begged him to quit. My mom woke up every day with headaches in the smoke-filled house. Dad would’ve laughed at a warning label purporting to be more powerful than his family’s pleas. Even his grandson telling him he smelled foul from cigarettes didn’t make him stop.
It took lung cancer, surgery, a relapse and chemotherapy to get him off the smokes.
The images that the FDA chose to use are pretty tame compared with the graphic tobacco-warning labels in other countries. The face that looks like a blistered and scorched marshmallow, which smokers in Singapore see whenever they light up, is especially gross. Canada has photos of dirty lungs. Malaysia has a foot blackened with gangrene. Venezuela has a mouth with gums blistering with pus.
Smoking is a nasty, pernicious and deadly addiction.
And smokers such as Wilder know that.
“I saw my mom go on oxygen. I saw my grandmother go on oxygen. I know. I know,” said Daniel Eagen, 36, who was pulling on a Marlboro red one hot afternoon this week in the alley outside the fancy downtown D.C. restaurant where he is a sous-chef.
“It’s just, I need it to relieve the stress from in there,” he said, pointing to the kitchen behind him, which was winding down after the lunch rush.
He has tried the programs, the electronic cigarette, the pills, the gum.
Warning labels, in the end, seem pretty silly to someone who has spent a lifetime wrestling such an ominous demon.
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