QUOTE FROM ARTICLE: Smoke fills a pink windpipe. Lung tissue disintegrates. Fleshy cancers grow. It's not the latest horror flick -- these are scenes from the state's latest anti-tobacco ads. The three 30-second television spots were created by the National Tobacco Campaign of Australia, intended to scare people away from their cigarettes with special effects.

Massachusetts, which has been running anti-tobacco ads since 1993, in May became the first state to show 30-second spots on area movie screens. The ads finish with an 800-number for the state's "Quitline," which provides advice and referrals to counselors.

The spots, scheduled to air today through Jan. 5, are timed to allow people to make quitting a New Year's resolution "With this new campaign, we hope to change attitudes by making adult smokers more aware of the health risks of waiting to quit," Public Health Commissioner Howard Koh said.

One ad opens with a young professional woman lighting up outside an office building. As the ad follows the smoke down her throat and into her lungs, a narrator says, "Lungs are like a sponge with millions of tiny air sacks for transferring oxygen. Every breath of tobacco smoke attacks them.' Puffy red air sacks that fill the screen begin to shrivel and then melt away, like burning paper. "No wonder smokers feel short of breath. Their lungs are rotting."

In another ad, a man at a bus stop lights up. "One damaged cell is all it takes to start lung cancer growing," the narrator says. A fleshy lump starts to grow on the side of his windpipe, then another and another. Arguably, the most disturbing ad is the one that opens with a 30-something man inhaling a cigarette by his kitchen stove. The ad then cuts to a metal examining table where rubber-gloved hands massage a heart artery taken from a dead 32-year-old smoker.

The narrator: "This is part of an aorta, the main artery in the heart. Smoking makes the artery wall sticky and collect dangerous fatty deposits." A column of thick, yellowish paste drops out of one end. "That one is not being shown during dinner time," said Shepley Metcalf, a campaign spokeswoman.

COMMENTS: I'd like throw this despicable garbage in the face of anyone who gives me the tobacco company spiel about "courtesy and tolerance".

Let's see how the vermin would like it if our side showed their disintegrated brains, as they lie rotting in their diapers and drooling with their Alzheimer's disease, which they're twice as likely to get as smokers are to get lung cancer. And, smoking doesn't even cause heart disease -- infections do -- and those bastards have gotten away with scientific fraud for 30 years. Meanwhile, we smokers are forced to subsidize their health costs, not vice versa, just as we're forced to subsidize their hate-mongering and lies.

Every word from their mouths is nothing but a screech designed to drown out reason and reality, and to bully and intimidate others into servile toadying to their delusions of grandeur, their bloated egos, and their demented fantasies that they're "saving the world."

By

Carol Thompson
Smokers' Rights Action Group
P.O. Box 259575
Madison, WI 53725-9575
Phone: 608-249-4568