Yes, yes. We know. Your lungs turn to coal and your arteries fill with yellow gunk and your bones crumble into osteoporotic talcum powder and anything that can possibly get cancer does get cancer and finally all your limbs drop off and you need to employ a full-time nurse to strap the ciggy on to your stump so you can move it to and from your tumour-scarred mouth and inhale all that lovely, yummy burning cyanide. And your point is?
It's a tricky business persuading smokers not to smoke. Not least because everyone who has ever lit a cigarette knows that particular little shopping list ain't the half of it. What about the brown sludge lurking in your windpipe and the streaky black stuff behind your teeth and the curious taste of rancid rust first thing in the morning and the smell - dear God, the smell - of that rogue ashtray lurking under the pile of last Sunday's papers? There is no appropriate response but to run, screaming, to the newsagent's where you can stock up on another 20 and chainsmoke furiously until the horror fades into a contentedly noxious fug.
Can anything persuade Britain's smokers to quit? The NHS has tried fat dripping off fags, and pitiably enfeebled young people pleading for one last chance to see their loved ones, and weeping, newly bereaved cuties begging their parents to stop. None of it works. The problem is, you can't preach to smokers. However tough you get, they're tougher. If you can live with that cough and that smell and those statistics, crying children and photographs of our decaying internal organs are a doddle.
So the government has a new approach. "Getting a cat's bum mouth?", reads the latest public health ad. "Fags are the best ageing treatment money can buy. They make your skin look like an old dishrag. You know all that good stuff night creams and day creams do? Fags undo it. They're just plain ugly." Blimey. Our wizened crone of a smoker, the campaigners hope, might just be persuaded to set down her Superking and her copy of Hello! magazine for a few seconds and, as requested, text "ugly" to the number provided. The Department of Health will then send her a pack listing in even greater detail how grotesquely repulsive she has become. Thanks doctors!
The gentlemen's version doesn't pull its punches either. "Every year there are 120,000 men who smoke and can no longer have an erection. That's a lot, isn't it? There are more than 4,000 chemicals in cigarette smoke. Some of them damage your arteries, including the parts that keep you hard. If they go floppy, so do you."
The campaign, says a DoH spokes-person, is called "motivations that matter". Smokers would be happy to orphan their children or misplace a portion of lung, it suggests, so long as their lipliner doesn't smudge into the wrinkles around their mouth. Has humanity really evolved to the point where the very thing that got us this far - our survival instinct - is now less powerful than our vanity? Just ask a smoker.
