Am I the only person in the country who thinks those "Truth" commercials are absolutely terrible? I think you know the ones I'm talking about. The "Truth" commercials are the anti-tobacco PSAs which use a sort of performance art twist to advertise the point that really, marketing people have WAAAAAYYY too much spare time. They're right up there with the commercials about people who smoke pot, the commercials where a girl tokes up and gets in a car and then...prepare to laugh...speeds down the street and doesn't see the old man trying to cross the street so she runs him down. I believe the first time I saw that commercial I actually DID laugh out loud because I was trying to picture my friend's old college roommate (the one who named his goldfish "Endo" and used his fishbowl for bong water) doing anything at more than tortoise speed. I can't imagine it. It took him three minutes just to get out a complete sentence, and a trip to the corner store could take a whole weekend. He would have braked for individual air molecules, I can't believe there's no way he wouldn't have braked for an entire person.

I think the pot commercial people (they might have even been the Truth people, now that I think about it) realized their commercials were absolutely hilarious and at some point they started producing more honest stuff, showing a bunch of geeks sitting on a couch being stupid and eating lots of snacks while everyone else went out and did fun stuff and got laid. See, now THAT'S a commercial that speaks to 17 year olds. They don't care about "peer pressure." They care about panties and how to get into some.

Of the Truth commercials, I have seen only one that doesn't make me want to light up in spite. It features a man singing "you don't always die from tobacco" through his stoma and electronic voice box. See people? That's realism. There's a commercial that says "here. This sucks. You're only laughing because you're horrified and it calms the terror." Some smarmy ass little girl with an eyebrow piercing talking about how she gets in peoples' faces and yells "you shouldn't SMOKE" because she's so punk rock isn't going to endear me to rude nonsmokers. I suppose me getting in that girl's face and screaming "you shouldn't pierce your eyebrow, your face will AGE UNEVENLY" would be wrong, but I think it sort of equates to the same thing. I know a handfull of smokers, and I will take them politely standing downwind from me any day, compared to some militant little brat who really needs to learn some manners.

I think people know that smoking is bad. Let's not insult peoples' intelligence by putting baby dolls in melting ice sculptures of pregnant women (I don't even remember the point of that one) or by implying that the mom who takes her kid to a restaurant with a smoking section is nothing more than a slow sadistic child abuser. Let's be serious. Smoking is a HABIT. It's addicting. Nicotine becomes an instant gratification thing. So, let's think about some instant gratification reasons not to smoke.

It's expensive. Show the working class guy shelling out $400 a month to give himself a cough and a squint struggling to pay his rent or to go on that vacation. It smells pretty bad...show the girl on the date who gets rejected for tasting like an ashtray. Heck, show a time lapse slide show of the faces of people who smoke, showing the mouth lines and the skin tone and the teeth after only a few years.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that the health risks aren't very terrible and very real. I just think that people are perfectly aware of them, and using bratty teenagers as spokespeople is probably not the greatest idea on the planet. I get enough of people lecturing all the time, I don't want to see it on TV too. I'm pretty sure there are better ways of convincing people to quit smoking than blaming "big tobacco" and implying people didn't have a choice in the first place when they first started because it's all the evil corporations' faults. (Well...maybe the people from the 1940s were really misled, but come on, can anyone under 60 honestly say they had no idea smoking was bad? Seriously?)

I don't know, maybe I'm the only person who thinks the commercials are dumb. I'm sure they're good intentioned, but they're just so irritating I can't stand them. They really make me want to walk in on a filming wearing a Joe Camel shirt. Surely that's not the effect they wanted.