Sir, – The advertising agency the HSE employs in its TV anti-smoking campaign is to be congratulated for its often imaginative and hard-hitting television spots. However, I must take the agency to task for one particular recent effort, where the main message is that “one in every two smokers will die of a tobacco-related disease”.
Surely it must have occurred to someone in the agency that rather than discourage smoking, this message could achieve the exact opposite, as by a process of blindingly obvious statistical logic, the message confirms, for the smoker, that 50 per cent of smokers will not die of a tobacco-related disease.
I must say that in the current climate of universal opprobrium for smokers, this message is curiously one of the few that smokers will welcome! – Yours, etc,