It's trying too hard!

That's what it is.

All the memes

Yeah, they're doing it wrong again. Something they did or just some nebulous culture shift around ~2000 or so seemed to actually work, and it takes about four or five years before you can know whether what you did worked or not. Prior to the 2000 thing, it was scare tactics, which don't work on invincible teenagers. Then they switched to a less dramatic "it's not a big deal, it's okay to chose not to smoke" approach, which I think was the good one.

The real problem (in the US at least) is the 17 and 18 year-old kids smoking, which means the 13-16 year-old kids do it to be like their older peers. If you can break that cycle, even just once, you come as close to solving the problem as you can. But, since there is this lag time between the beginning of the cycle and it coming full circle, the industry assumes it was the most recent ("evil tobacco corporations taking advantage of you") effort that was actually the effective one. I don't think it is. I especially don't think it will work on college-age demographic they're targeting. It's still "The Man" telling them what to do, even if it's a different hand of "The Man."

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