We took a look recently at how the government gets it all wrong with anti-smoking campaigns by creating legislation that actually drives innovation in tobacco packaging. So I guess we shouldn’t be surprised – since our government is pretty much owned by all the industries that it’s supposed to regulate – that the FDA’s latest anti-smoking campaign looks like it was assembled by interns at RJ Reynolds’ ad agency. Although presumably inspired by the dramatic and offensive images used in the UK and Canada, the images in this campaign are almost kitschy, horribly retouched, and more likely to inspire Photoshop contests than deter smoking. As a smoker who occasionally ponders quitting, I can tell you with confidence that these images will have absolutely no impact on my cigarette consumption, nor any smokers I know. In fact, when other countries mandated that cigarette makers place these images on their packages, a friend of mine would ask friends traveling abroad to try to get him complete “sets” of all the disgusting images for his collection. Telling a smoker to quit smoking because it’s going to kill them is much like telling a skate punk to quit skateboarding because he’ll end up with broken bones poking out of his skin. The danger is part of the seductive nihilistic appeal. If the government really wanted adults to quit smoking, they’d issue free Chantix. It would probably be cheaper than all of these PR campaigns, and might actually help a few people quit. And when it comes to preventing youngsters from starting, I think The Onion was onto something with their It’s Gay To Smoke parody (video below). If you could actually get teens to associate sticking a cigarette in their mouth with sticking a penis in their mouth, peer pressure would take on a whole new dynamic, and maybe the youngsters that really do want a penis in their mouth could get down to business, and the rest could be “scared straight”, so to speak. But seriously, the fact is that a typical teen these days looks for images more graphic than these on purpose, so they’re certainly not going to be deterred from smoking by looking at them. I’d even argue that it’s sort of like the giggling, gross-out teen equivalent of the way Mad Men glamorizes smoking. So below are a few stabs at some alternatives. We challenge you to Photoshop and submit something better, which shouldn’t be hard; these took me about ten minutes. The FDA site has the images in a PDF file (13MB) or zipped JPEGs (6MB) if you’re interested.

New Anti-Smoking Ads Warn Teens ‘It’s Gay To Smoke’

The CDC’s new anti-smoking campaign effectively reaches teens with a simple message: if you smoke, people are going to know you’re totally crazy for butt sex.

This man in this image from the campaign bears a remarkable resemblance to….

…someone who had plenty of heart problems without smoking:

Maybe if the smoker thought about where their money was going: