Your health is your own responsibility

A notice was posted at the door of a gas station convenience store.
It said "a Federal court" had determined that two tobacco companies had deliberately added nicotine to their cigarettes to make them more addictive.

Apparently the punishment the judges had decided on was to force anyone selling those cigarettes to post this notice to shame the tobacco companies and to warn people buying cigarettes.
Several thoughts go through my head about all of this.

First of all, is this "warning" going to stop any smokers from buying cigarettes, or cause them to smoke less because it made them stop and think? I don't think it's going to stop a single person from going in there and buying cigarettes if they were intending on buying them.

Second, if the store itself in whose window this notice was placed actually thought there was any validity to the accusations made by that notice, shouldn't they simply stop selling those cigarettes rather than post that insincere notice in their window?

I suppose the tobacco companies have enough money that the judges knew it would be practically useless to try to ban the sale of cigarettes, so they chose this half-measure of requiring warnings to be posted rather than try to rule against the sale of the cigarettes.

Is this curtailing the sales of cigarettes? Smoking has been made illegal in so many locations, that has undoubtedly done more to stop people from smoking than anything else has.
The people still buying cigarettes are supposedly hard-core addicts.

And what does this notice at the gas station store do? It says "Hey, all you hard-core tobacco fiends, it's not your fault! It's the cigarette companies' faults, they MADE you an addict by adding extra nicotine to the cigarettes!".

And what does that do? That lets the cigarette smokers of 2024 shrug off any personal responsibility for their own behavior.
"Sure I'm still smoking in the 21st century, after more than 50 years of Surgeon General warnings posted on the cigarette packs. But that's because I'm an addict, and the reason I'm an addict is because those rotten tobacco companies deliberately added extra addiction-causing nicotine to the product. I'm not to blame for the fact that I'm still smoking decades after it ceased to be socially acceptable or medically excusable. Blame the cigarette companies! ... . Now, give me two packs of Newports and one pack of Lucky Strike."

If anything, these "warning notices" in the convenience store window are encouraging smokers to continue buying those cigarettes, by telling them in a semi-subliminal way that it's not their responsibility to decide to stop smoking. Point the finger of blame at the tobacco companies, and dismiss your own personal responsibility for your own personal physical health.

The only thing that's going to stop people from smoking, other than banning the sale of cigarettes, is people taking personal responsibility for their own voluntary behaviors.
By telling people that their behaviors are not voluntary because they've been "tricked" into the smoking habit by addictive chemicals in the cigarettes which deprived them of personal free will, they are only encouraging people to continue in those behaviors.

The same rationalizations were used 40-60 years ago in debates about other drug uses. It was always about blaming the "pushers' for adding substances to the drugs that made the users "hooked" so they could no longer stop themselves. It was always "It's not MY fault I'm a junky, it's the damn Pushers! Blame THEM for my drug addictions! Now give me some new intravenous needles, because I intend to share some heroin with my drug buddies, but I don't want to get AIDS."

January 4, 2024