Does this anti-smoking ad constitute child abuse?

I agree that it is a waste of money.

It would be more effective if you see a bride walking down the aisle alone becuse her dad isn't there to walk her, or the birth of a grandson that they will never see. Better yet, a bride walking down the aisle with her dad and an oxygen tank....

Smokers (I am an ex-smoker... quit 7 years ago) know they are going to die. They also don't believe it will be in the immediate future. They know smoking shortens your life, but not instantly. They believe they will see their young kids will grow up.

Assuming the child isn't acting, I would agree that it's unethical to subject him to that kind of trauma, regardless of the worthiness of the cause. Putting an uncomprehending child in a position designed to elicit fearful tears is wrong, especially for propagandistic purposes like this.

I agree with PNV that these ads are a waste of time and money.

It is simply a policy ad. They did not really abandon a child. There were only trying to make a statement and no children were harmed in the making of that policy ad. The child was probably acting anyway.

I don't know how old the child is - I'm not good at guessing ages - but Shirley Temple was a toddler when she began dancing in movie shorts. She was notable for her ability to convincingly cry on demand. I think very young children learn the concept of "Let's pretend" at a pretty early age. Any parent taking their child to casting calls is going to be coaching him/her in certain behaviors.

So I would say, no, this is probably not abusive.

If the video is depicting an actual child with no acting skills that was in fact abandoned by his mother even for a short period relying that she would remain with him in that very huge terminal, all for the sake of making a commercial -

Yes. It is child abuse.

This is SICK! How any ANYONE use a child like this? You bet your A$$ it's child abuse.

This debate has been around for a while. I think I first saw the ad at least a year, or possibly two years ago. If it was "acted" then the creators would definitely have come out and said so and probably even produced a "defense video" where the kid would have repeated the performance in a studio. So I'd say it's probably pretty clear that it was not acting.

The people pushing the antismoking agenda have very few morals when it comes to "the end justifying the means." They see smoking as an "ultimate evil" and any collateral damage that comes out of their actions, whether it's crying children, withholding of medical care, homeless seniors, failed businesses, family breakups, spousal or child abuse "corrections" for misbehavior, extra poverty or terrorist funding induced by tax hikes, increased fires due to "hidden smoking," any and all of these are simply written off as contributing to "the greater good" of eliminating smoking.

The lies behind their work need to be understood and exposed because the harm they do may very well be far greater than the harm they prevent even if one *does* accept the end justifying the means. There's not room to argue the whole case here, but people are welcome to read my free "Stiletto" ("The Lies Behind The Smoking Bans") Just google the term StilettoGenv5h and it's right in the first few listings.

Feel free to offer any specific criticisms if you like. I'm open about who I am, what my "competing interest" might be, and I stand firmly behind every word that I write.

Michael J. McFadden,

Author of "Dissecting Antismokers' Brains"

I remember seeing this ad 3 years ago. It always pulls at my heartstrings and
makes me want to cry as a mother. It abuses everyone.
Anti's are just cruel!

The demonization of loving parents who happen to be smokers is the abuse here!  Whoever made this video should be jailed for hate crimes!

Nike spoke of using frightened, crying children to convince smokers to quit and felt it would be effective only on a tiny minority. Nike, have faith, you need to realize that this is just one small part of the overall behavioral conditioning.

If you really don't want the rats to eat a certain favorite food, you don't simply give them little electric shocks when they try. Instead you combine and alternate multiple negative stimuli:

Maybe a freezing cold jet of air or loud honking noises (Similar to being outside of a bar in February);

a bad taste or removal of a good taste (The FDA is working on it);

social isolation punishment or even removal of offspring for incorrect behaviors (Expelling smokers from public housing and taking smokers' children away in custody disputes is hoped to be quite effective: See ASH.org for more on this);

making the food more difficult/uncomfortable/"expensive" to get (Mayor Bloomberg, The Gothamist, 09/16/09: NY is committed "to make it as difficult and as expensive to smoke as we possibly can.");

frightening the rat with the idea the food might be deadly (Leave a dead rat or put a picture of a diseased body nearby.);

vaccinate the rat to make it "allergic" to the food (Nic-Vaxx currently being tested on rats actually, but not quite ready for babies yet.);

alter its genes or damage its brain to remove the food's good taste (Nonsmokers tend to have damaged p-53 genes that can't adequately process the pleasurable effects of nicotine. Injuring the insular cortex removes the pleasure of nicotine.)

Lots of possibilities, lots of fun ahead. This is the first time we've legally been able to test these sorts of things on a widespread pool of human subjects for over 60 years so cut us a break!

Welcome to our brave new world. Say hi to Georgie O. when you see him.

.

Michael J. McFadden, Author of "Dissecting Antismokers' Brains"

OK. Sorry Bonos! Let's try it a different way - I'm just trying to get PNV to a page where he can see that I am definitely *NOT* attacking smokers, but most of the pages I've written have at least a link to a link to my main internet site in which one of the subpages has an address where people can order Brains. If my current suggestion still poses a problem please send me an email and we can try to find a way to communicate it to PNV, OK? :) My email is Cantiloper over on the aol system although it's also available through a link to a sublink of the page I'll be directing you to below.

PNV, I would suggest you google my name in quotes and then, also in quotes, the phrase "ice cream." One of the top options should be a cute statement about the relationship of truth and lies. If you click on that you will find a 6,000 word article examining the lies told by Antismokers in promoting their bans and engaging in the sort of vilification (comparing smokers to rats etc) that you thought I was engaging in with my above satirical comment.

:)

Michael

This ad abuses both adults and children in the most fraudulent way. The child can't be any older than 4. How old can the parents of the child possibly be? In all likelihood between 22 and 40. How many smokers die at that age? Most smokers die over 60 years old, some go well into their 100's. Do you know of many parents who died of alleged smoking related diseases who left such young children behind? Hardly!

This ad not only abuses of the young child by making him genuinely terrified by all looks of it, but fraudulently manipulates the emotions of both adults and children and interferes with parenthood in uncalled for ways. But all is good when it comes to anti-smoking some will tell you ! Well it is NOT and people should officially complain of any ads that play with people's emotions in such a despicable way!

It depends which ones.

The anti smoker money machine has gone too far and play a very dangerous game with the emotions of people over a very legal product. It is my hope that people will realise on a daily basis people are PAID to tantilize you and work on your emotions, they face NO fear of prosecution for doing it.

There is no education value in this ad. What is being promoted is an ideological norm which divides communities and entitles hatred [denormalization] in place of the former norm, which entitled accommodation and compromises. No one complained when non smoking areas were proposed in fact most applauded the move which made the most people comfortable with no insult or injury to anyone.

What I find objectionable is a deliberate move by governments in compliance with World Health Organizational [WHO] treaties, to control us by turning us upon ourselves for the supposed "greater good". The premise of personal rights is to afford us all collectively greater power and freedom, over the tendency of governments to exaggerate their power over us, in order to suit their own agendas.

When you can hire terrorists with the public purse, to divide a community and people call for legislation [or the hired government lobbies in the absence of public support make those demands for us] the only entitlement for those laws, is the government position; that we are all too ignorant or immarture to settle disputes on our own.

The government claims a duty to take a paternalist role and settle those issues for us. If the free market was allowed to work as it always has and let the owners of private property serve their clients needs, smoking bans would still be judged today as rediculous as they were when first proposed, by what we knew to be fanatics and lunatics at that time. Social control and new norms have taken us into the camp of those same lunatics and fanatics, whether we wished to be there  or not.

Observation has demonstrated for centuries that a smoke free environment inhabited by large groups of people is  more dangerous environment by far, in the spread of airborne diseases and viruses. The WHO has in parallel with the anti-smoker campaign continually predicted that a flu pandemic is not a matter of "if" but a matter of "when". A self fulfilling prophesy obviously while all the so called "Public Health Industry experts" who publish research in the press before the journals, stand silent in response to the real evaluations of risk.

The CDC proposes that as many as 3000 """could"" die every year by second hand smoke and also states clearly with medical observations in hand, that more than 35,000 die every year from the common flu alone.

Tobacco smoke particulate acts as a sticky filter floating in the air, collecting with 100% efficiency in time, all of the smaller constituents of the air in a room. Being much too large to pass into the bloodstream through your lungs they in turn are trapped by the whetted protective phlegm in your lungs and are expelled as with all trapped particulate, when you cough. Your body has defense syetems built right in, that are never mentioned when creating scares and bandwagons.

The sale of drug industry "alternative products" is the motivation for governments and the entitlement for pseudo-science as a religious following. In place of the real version of science that does not include estimates or words lijke "could" "might" or "may",  real science is observational and reproducable. Epidemiology as a philosophy or directional proof; just as the demon tobacco industry funding can skew the results, so too can they be skewed by the other side of the accusation, who are much less that the loving credible authority they pretend to be.

Can you afford to launch an interrnational advertising campaign and maintain it for over a decade? Who can, and what would be the motivation for that huge multi-billion dollar expendature?

Are you fool enough to believe they are interested in your well being, over the sustenance of their own?

The half truths at play promote the one half truth, that virtually the entire community accepted as gospel. The half they avoid is the fact that those thousands of trace amounts, most below normal definitions of "below levels of detection" [Below 50ng/cubic meter of air] The"deadly toxins" found in the smoke, are also trapped by the smoke with the vast majority not even originating from the tobacco plant or the added ingredients.

Do heavy metals and industrial chemicals really grow on trees?

Is the Emperor really wearing any clothes?

The joke is on you through your naive conditioning, by people you were also taught to trust. The largest studies have shown [WHO et al, Enstrom and Kabat et al} that tobacco smoke has a protective effect over children who live with smokers. The results are always rejected by the overseers in the conjoined Medical Medicine industry, as flaws in the research, as too incredible to believe. Yet the same research accepts much lowered numbers in relation to harms to non smokers, produced by the smoke which are described as "significant risk" in spite of the obvious.

I don't think it's a good ad. It pisses people off and doesn't get the message across that it is trying too. It reeks of propaganda. I hate the anti- drug commercials worse. Scare tactics are lame. Factual information presented in an entertaining and attention grabbing way (maybe make it funny) without too much exaggeration or shock value would be much more effective. Smokers are rebelling - get it?

Babbarama asked;

"Then you would allow your 5 year old child to smoke, is that correct?"

Are you of the belief that the smell of cigarette smoke is equal to smoking?

In the 1800s school children were actually told to smoke or face punishment, to prevent themselves and others from contracting the plague. In comparison to the toxins that are present when people breathe, cigarette smoke is no match for the flu. By real numbers beyod the irresponsible fanatacisms that created second hand smoke.

Originally the fear was created by Nazi propaganda. Long before the invention of the micro-chip and our increased capability to resolve calculated risk factors and their proper distribution. What we see today is no different than the radicalism inspired of the anti-saloon league and more recently parroting paternalist Hitler's trash verbatim, with newly formed targeted "me first" divisive hatred. The notion that any of us could expect to live forever, by compliance with the ever more oppressive demands of fanatics, is the real risk being promoted for profit and power.

While the cheerleaders hide from the reality in order to provider protections we have to sacrifice the notion that we are intelligent and caring people [all of us], we are to be assumed innocent and intelligent as the first perspective and are able to solve these problems without the paternalist hand of governments, interferring with every move you make.

Would I allow a very young child to smoke?

A child too young to make informed decisions on their own?

No, not likely, but with the "rights of a child legislation" now as a legal absolute over parental autonomy "for the greater good". By the fools who tell us "it takes a village to raise a child"[IOW no parent can be trusted] as their excuse for eliminating a parents authority over their own children, my rights to stop them, are now completely in the hands of the Government and their paid lobby fanatics.

If the lobbies decided by some convoluted pseudoscience benefit tomorrow, that children should be smoking, after an extended ad campaign; you would be facing punishment for not making them smoke. I have to ask, if the lobbies demanded it, would you also be so willing to bend over on command?

In terms of children being exposed to smoke, you might want to check out my collection of study results at:

http://www.nycclash.com/Philly.html#ETSTable

and note the "childhood exposure" studies at the bottom. Note how many of them, including the huge one done by the World Health Organization, show a PROTECTIVE effect from such exposure.

And then ask yourself why you've never heard of this before.

- MJM