‘I can’t even name a brand of cigarettes’: How smoking ban worked when many said it couldn’t...
THE complete prohibition on cigarette advertising in recent years shows how just successful a comprehensive ban can be, according to an Irish Heart Foundation executive.
According to Chris Macey, Irish Heart Foundation head of advocacy, there are 750,000 fewer smokers in Ireland in the last 10 to 12 years. Tobacco advertising has been banned in Ireland since 2000, with the industry also hit by a series of price increases. In 2004, Ireland became the first country in the world to ban smoking in any place of work – something which many nay-sayers said could never be achieved, let alone be a success.
He said: ‘We have something like 750,000 fewer smokers in Ireland in the last 10 or 12 years. That would not have been possible if advertising was allowed.
‘The interesting thing about smoking is that we tried advertising to people to say smoking is bad for you, and it did not work because the tobacco companies outspend us 20 to one.
‘The only reason people are smoking less now is regulation. It is denormalisation but if you said that about junk food, marketing people would be banging on your door calling you a nanny state.
‘It’s the same principle and will eventually been seen as such.’
In a straw poll of our reporters, the twenty-somethings – who have never known cigarette advertising or smoking in bars and restaurants – had never smoked. One reporter couldn’t even name a brand of cigarettes. Here they give an insight into just how extraordinarily well the cigarette ban has worked. WHEN I was growing up, cigarettes were never even a consideration. My parents never smoked and I don’t remember seeing advertising for cigarettes.
In fact, on the one occasion a family friend handed my mother a cigarette – I was around eight-years-old – I remember crying at her knees about how dangerous they were and how they would kill her.
I was aware of the dangers to say the least – my grandfather died from lung cancer after smoking heavily his entire life.
My father made it clear from a very young age that smoking was not something our family did or had anything to do with – and I have stuck to that since. I could not name a single cigarette brand.
Emer Scully FOR me, I can only really think of two cigarette brands, Lucky Strike and Red Apple cigarettes, but I’ve never actually seen either of them up close.
Lucky Strike is an actual cigarette company.
But but I only became familiar with it through the pilot episode of Mad Men where the chain-smoking ad men were tasked with coming up with a way of selling them. Red Apple cigarettes on the other hand is the fictional brand seen in every Quentin Tarantino movie.
It is not that I didn’t grow up with people smoking around me.
My grandmother lived to 102 smoking at least a pack a day.
But I can’t for the life of me remember what brand she preferred. Ronan Smyth GROWING up I often wondered why there were so many antismoking campaigns geared towards teenagers for something that really didn’t seem to be a problem.
Far from being ‘cool’, I vividly remember friends commenting on different occasions that boys who smoked were ‘gross’ and that they didn’t fancy kissing a human ashtray. I always knew my parents didn’t want me to drink before I turned 18 but I don’t remember us ever discussing cigarettes.
I used to visit my grandad, who wore a ventilator mask. My dad told me it was because he had smoked and his lungs were sick.
Maybe that image of him in the mask has been the most influential anti-smoking advert ever.
Jane Fallon Griffin
HAVING grown up around older family members who were heavy smokers, I saw firsthand the effects of cigarettes and promised myself from a very young age that I would never take up the habit.
Unlike my grandparents and parents, I grew up in a time when smoking was always portrayed as a dirty habit.
Thanks to the smoking ban, my image of a smoker has always been someone standing outside in the freezing cold for the sake of a cigarette, a far cry from the glamorous portrayal of smoking in previous generations.
There is not one person in my peer group who smokes regularly, and apart from the ‘social smokers’ who only have a cigarette on a night out, it would be unusual to see someone in their early twenties smoking.
Lisa O’Donnell