Those of you who have been reading Nothing-Sacred for a long time know that we have done a lot of articles about annoying commercials -- probably enough to make one more article on the subject even more annoying that the commercials discussed in it.  Yet I, Iced Alex, have somehow got the balls to write another article on that subject.  Why?  Because the commercials I am going to talk about in this article are so irritating, they make all the other annoying commercials we've complained about on Nothing-Sacred seem fun to watch.  I am talking, of course, about those anti-smoking ads that have been plaguing American television lately -- both the anti-cigarette and anti-marijuana ones.  So with this introduction out of the way, let me tell you, Nothing-Sacred readers, why I can't stand those commercials, starting with the anti-cigarette ones and moving on to anti-pot ones.

Are you as tired of those truth.com ads as I am?  According to these ads, it's Okay to harass people in their homes, pollute the streets with excessive and irritating noise, litter the sidewalks with dog shit, and generally annoy the living fuck out of everyone around you as well as the millions of people watching you on TV as long as you don't smoke.  An ad of theirs that I find especially stupid is where a teenage girl sneaks out in the middle of the night while her parents are sleeping to go to a party, and when someone at the party offers her a cigarette, she refuses because "[her] parents would freak."  What's next, an ad where a teenage boy is drinking rubbing alcohol, shooting up heroin, and prostituting himself to old men in his parents' house while his parents are away, and when one of his johns offers him a cigarette, he politely refuses claiming that his parents raised him better than that?    I mean I don't smoke, but these commercials make me want to start smoking just to spite the people who make them.

And the claims these commercials make are outrageous.  A have seen a few of them that tried to inform me that "tobacco kills" well over a thousand people every year.  That's a lie if I ever heard one!  Do you know how many people tobacco really kills every year?  None!  Zero!  Not one single person!  You see, saying "tobacco kills" implies cigarettes jumping out of their pack at night, grabbing a pick axe, and hacking the poor sap who bought them to death, and I will not believe that cigarettes kill anyone until I hear about that happening.  A guy smoking two packs of cigarettes a day and dying of lung cancer after forty years of that can hardly be described as tobacco "killing" the guy.  And the fact that he got lung cancer from all that smoking is his fault, not tobacco's, not the tobacco companies', and not anyone else's for that matter.

What pisses me off even more than the content of these ads and the claims they make is the fact that they are paid for by the government and, thus, with my tax dollars.  I worked too damn hard for that money to have it spent on making stupid commercials trying to prevent teens from smoking.  If some dumb high school kid wants to fill his lungs with smoke to look cool in front of his friends, that's nobody's business but his and his parents'.  I don't go around encouraging high school kids to smoke, so please don't spend my money on preventing them from doing it -- spend my money on something more useful (by "useful" I, of course, mean beneficial to me).  And if you are gonna spend my tax dollars on discouraging teens from doing just one legal drug, wouldn't making alcohol that drug be a better use of those dollars?  I mean no one has ever smoked a pack of cigarettes in one sitting and woke up the next morning next to a fat girl with herpes unable to remember how s/he got there.  No one has ever consumed so much nicotine so fast that they were unable to drive properly, yet they got behind the wheel of a car anyway and killed someone as a result.  No one has ever beat, shot, or stabbed anyone to death while under the influence of nicotine.  So, please, if you are gonna spend my tax money that way, spend it in a way that's just a little more valuable.

Every bit as irritating as the anti-cigarette ads are the anti-marijuana ads.  The underlying message of these ads seems to be that everything that may or may not happen while someone is high on marijuana is the fault of marijuana and nothing and no one else.  An anti-pot commercial that's a great example of that is the one where a bunch of guys who have smoked so much pot that the car they are driving is literally filled with so much smoke that you can see it pull away from a drive through window of a fast food joint (no pun intended) and hit a kid who is riding his bike in front of the drive through because the pot they were smoking has supposedly altered the driver's perception that much.  Then the voice behind the screen says something along the lines that the kid died because these guys were smoking pot, and that it's the pot's fault that he died.  That's right, the blame is placed with the pot... not with the kid's mother who let her offspring ride his bike in front of a drive through unsupervised, not with the kid who was stupid enough to ride his bike in front of a drive through without so much as paying attention to cars that were coming out, not with the driver who got behind the wheel while high as a kite, but the pot.  Whatever happened to people being responsible for their actions?  Well, I guess blaming everyone but the person in question for a person's problems is the modern day American way, with all the dumb lawsuits and everything else going on lately.

By the way, as anyone who went to college in America, I have known and still know a lot of pot smokers, but I have yet to meet anyone who smokes half as much pot in one time as the guys in this commercial.  Come to think of it, how likely is a scenario where a kid riding his bike unsupervised in front of a drive through gets hit by a car filled with visible pot smoke to happen in real life?  That reflects another problem with these ads -- the situations they portray are usually completely unrealistic.  Considering that most of today's young people know the reality of how pot effects its users, such unrealistic ads not only don't discourage young people from smoking pot, they encourage them to smoke it by sending them the message that the people who make pot illegal don't know their ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to real effects of pot, and, therefore, have no authority to make it illegal.

When the people who make the anti pot-smoking commercials do try to come up with a realistic scenario, they fail miserably to give a compelling reason why they put so much effort into trying (and failing) to prevent pot from entering American society.  Take, for example, the recent commercial that shows a kid sitting on the sidewalk waiting for his brother to pick him up and his brother never shows up.  Then the voice behind the screen explains how the brother didn't show up because he was smoking pot and forgot all about his younger sibling as a result.  I don't know about the rest of this commercial's target audience, but when I watch it I think to myself: "So the government putting so much money (including a lot of my tax money) and effort into 'keeping marijuana off the streets' and this is the most compelling reason they can come with up for it?  Gee, maybe that marijuana stuff isn't all that bad.  Hmm, I'm kinda curious what all the fuss is about; maybe I should go out and try some."  You'd think with all the resources spent on the "war on drugs" and on battling marijuana in particular they'd put more effort into putting more compelling arguments for keeping marijuana illegal into these ads.  Or maybe the cannot come up with any compelling arguments no matter how hard they try because there are none?  Maybe the real reason it is kept illegal is to create a scapegoat for society's problems and for politicians to have a reason to pet themselves on the back?  Maybe showing an anti pot-smoking commercial and a beer commercial in the same commercial break is a show of blatant hypocrisy?  Or maybe I am just getting all these weird thoughts in my head because I just smoked some of that evil marijuana... or some murderous cigarettes?

- Iced Alex