We’ve all been bombarded with them: these anti-smoking ad campaigns. They’re on the tv, the radio, everywhere. I find them personally very annoying, even though I’m not a smoker. Being continuously flooded with them makes me want to take up smoking just to give an old-fashioned “Fuck you!” to the Man. And maybe that’s partly what they’re designed to do. I wouldn’t be overly surprised, since I know some of the money for those things comes from tobacco companies to begin with. Supposedly, some of the rules for that money coming from these companies goes back to when the big companies had those class-action suits brought up against them.

But anyway, I heard another ad yesterday on the radio which made me stop and thinking. It was for some website, which I now forget, where you could learn about how to quit smoking and find out about “cessation aids.” Which probably means things like Nicarette and Nicotrol and “the Patch” and all those millions of products marketed by drug companies, to help you transfer your addictions over to be managed by their products. In any event, I wanted to try and find out if big drug companies like Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Glaxo-Smith-Kline were in fact contributing money to these anti-smoking campaigns. I mean, it just makes sense that they would really. And these campaigns are obviously very very well-funded, since they are just all around everywhere.

If anybody has any links or info they’ve seen on any of this, I’d be inetersted in checking it out.