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-- A. Serwer
Martin Lindstrom argues in The New York Times today that big warning labels and explicit photographs meant to discourage smoking actually just make smokers want to toke more:
Each subject lay in the scanner for about an hour while we projected on a small screen a series of cigarette package labels from various countries — including statements like “smoking kills” and “smoking causes fatal lung cancers.” We found that the warnings prompted no blood flow to the amygdala, the part of the brain that registers alarm, or to the part of the cortex that would be involved in any effort to register disapproval.Lindstrom's findings seem pretty conclusive, and so he argues that the government is wasting money on anti-smoking measures. The only problem is that smoking does genuinely seem to be declining, according to the CDC, and has gone down a great deal since the tobacco hearings during the Clinton Administration. Obviously not all of this is due to advertising -- there are other anti-smoking measures like bans in bars and restaurants. Maybe warning labels don't help, but certainly there are fewer people smoking since governments made a concerted effort to limit the practice.To the contrary, the warning labels backfired: they stimulated the nucleus accumbens, sometimes called the “craving spot,” which lights up on f.M.R.I. whenever a person craves something, whether it’s alcohol, drugs, tobacco or gambling.
-- A. Serwer
