On May 31, 2008, our Health Ministry had announced that the cigarette packs would be displaying the above pictorial warnings. Six required images were gazetted. I think this plan should be implemented earlier as Singapore had already passed the law so that the smokers could be warned the consequences of the bad habit in the year 2004. However, how far have these gory images actually worked theoretically to decrease the population of smokers in our country?
I heard that some of the aged smokers do not really care about the warnings by thinking "what's the difference I can make if I quit smoking now as I've been smoking for more than twenty years? I could have died earlier if it is fatal!" Okay every properly educated individual does know about the serious consequences of this bad habit and I'm not going to repeat the cliche, therefore I would rather reveal some statistics:
- Study proposes that on average a habitual smoker's lifespan will be shortened for about 5.5 minutes for each cigarette smoked, which is not much less than the time he spends smoking it.
- For every 8 - 10 seconds, there will be a person who has died from smoking related illness.
- There are 15 billion cigarettes are sold daily - or 10 million every minute.
- Smoking is on the rise in the developing world but falling in developed nations. It is estimated that among the 3 million of people died from smoking in the last year, the developing countries occupy 2 million whereas the developed countries got 1 million. ( Current world population is estimated to be more than 6 billion, therefore )
- There are between 80,000 and 100,000 children worldwide start smoking every day - roughly half of whom live in Asia.
Look at the unscrupulous retailers who have covered the scary images by using the price tags intentionally :(
