FDA proposes new line of cigarette warning graphics

After being granted the power to regulate tobacco products for the first time last year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has come up with a new anti-cigarette marketing campaign that the agency hopes will help deter people from smoking. According to a recent New York Times report, the FDA has proposed 36 graphic warning labels it hopes to plaster on cigarette cartons and advertisement billboards in the near future.

The graphics include a picture of corpse feet with the tag line, "Warning: Cigarettes cause fatal lung disease". And another shows a dead body in a casket with the caption, "Warning: Smoking can kill you". On the cartons themselves, the proposed warnings are designed to take up half the box. And on billboards, the warnings will cover 20 percent of the overall advertisement.

Similar graphics already appear on cigarette cartons in Europe, where reports indicate that they have resulted in some success. And many laud the U.S. initiative as a large step towards making smoking so unattractive that increasingly fewer Americans will be willing to participate in it. By illustrating the long-term effects of smoking's consequences, regulators say that young people especially will be less prone to smoke.

According to current statistics, 1,000 new children and teenagers become regular smokers every single day, while 4,000 try it for the first time. And this occurs despite current warning labels that indicate cigarettes cause lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema, and pregnancy problems, leading some to question whether or not the graphics campaign will have much effect.

Even so, Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Kathleen Sebelius praised the proposal as an "important milestone in protecting our children and the health of the American public", and Matthew L. Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, said it is the "most important change in cigarette health warnings in the history of the United States."

Is Mystery a failure ?

My friend just completed a workshop with Mystery, the man himself, and gave me some very interesting tidbits. Supposedly he gabbed about pickup for seven hours straight. Seven bloody hours! They didn’t do approaches in that time….no, Mystery talked. And talked, and talked.

“So…how was that for you?” I ask him.

“Awesome!” he gasps.

I’ve always been under the belief that real world experience—like throwing a baby into a pool, is the best way to rapidly learn a subject. But how many babies have drowned? Isn’t it best to lead by example?

“Did he do any demo approaches?”


“Yeah. Three.”

“Three!? In two days?”

“He got blown out twice, and the other was a makeout with a cougar.”

“Cool.”

Anyways, he did teach the same routines, the same club tactics, and did very few demos but my friend was ecstatic, completely satisfied and completely brainwashed by the man. I love it. Personally I would take his bootcamp (If I had an extra 5k). Why not? Here’s the lesson….

No one has a 100% success rate

Gurus fail! All my friends are extremely talented…and they fail–lots. Hell…I have failed so much I could kill myself. Everything is just, “what it is,” if that makes sense. To be great at seduction, you must step into the fire and get burned. It’s a crap cliché I know, but learn to embrace failure.

Once I grabbed this girl by the wrist, and she opened right up. We were chatting along well and I said, “Hey, you have really soft hands. What brand of moisturizer do you use?”

She blinks a few times, tells me the brand, and say’s goodbye. I look over to her table and she’s speaking with a six foot tall douche type. He storms over to me and say’s, “Hey moth#$fuc@er! I’m the provider! What’s this creepy shit you’re saying to my girlfriend?”

Options:

A. That troll is your girlfriend? She’s an idiot.
B. Punch douche in face
C. Oh her? Yeah, I was totally hitting on her. Good work buddy! She’s hot! (With calm assertive eye contact.)

I chose C and he deflated. Most men aren’t ready to engage in combat. There are consequences. Years of frame control practice saved my life. All the times I have failed, saved my life. Or at least saved me from a severe and pointless beating.

So this is but one reason why coaches are shying away from demo approaches. There are many. Another is because students witnessing perceived, “failure,” aren’t in-fact failures. But up they go into online reviews. They expect their coaches to be no mere mortals, but gods, floating through the club hypnotizing all beautiful women. No. It’s not like that.

Some nights feel like this, but usually it’s a lot of small talk, a few back turns, and some good luck. Even Mystery can’t make miracles happen. He can be charming, and brilliant, but can’t ensure a stupid, low value woman won’t try to start a fight for her own sick amusement?

All men are mere mortals

The lesson you can take from this post? All men are merely mortal and the worst is yet to come. Every time you cold approach is a new, unpredictable adventure into the lives of strangers. Some of them are friendly and some are brutally unstable. You can do your best to be calm, assertive and fun—but you never know if you will land a make-out, or a knock out. That’s why you should do it anyway. Who wants to live forever?

Costs Of Smoking: Years-Of-Healthy-Life Lost To Smoking

Understanding the burden of disease attributable to smoking over time and at the national and state levels is of utmost importance with regard to specifying quantifiable targets and examining the impact of interventions designed to promote smoking cessation.

The overall health burden of smoking in the U.S. was examined by calculating smoking-related quality-adjusted life years (QALYs)-which account for both morbidity and mortality- lost from 1993 to 2008 for the entire nation and for each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. In addition, this study also examined the impact of the state excise tax on the state smoking-related QALYs lost.

Progress has been made with regard to smoking cessation but the smoking prevalence for the U.S. remains above the Healthy People 2010 target. Although the percent of smoking was lower for women and the percentage of smoking prevalence decrease was higher among women, the smoking-related QALYs lost increased for women compared to men. Smoking-related QALYs lost increased for the general US population and for nearly three-fourths of the states while the disparities in state prevalence and state smoking-related QALYs lost widened. States with a higher excise tax had a greater percentage decline as well as fewer smoking-related QALYs lost.

Says Dr. Jia: "These results might assist public health practitioners and policymakers in setting smoking-related targets for the nation and tracking changes in the burden of disease attributable to smoking in a timely manner. The method also can delineate priorities for prevention in a given population at the national, state, and local levels as well as according to sociodemographic subgroup."

The burden of disease attributed to smoking will be discussed in Value in Health, the official journal of the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research. Value in Health publishes papers, concepts, and ideas that advance the field of pharmacoeconomics and outcomes research and help health care leaders to make decisions that are solidly evidence-based. The journal is published bi-monthly and has a regular readership of over 5,000 clinicians, decision-makers, and researchers worldwide.