Yankee soldier, he wanna shoot that skag
Matt Yglesias:
But I worry that it may actually be counterproductive for some people to gloss over the fact that if you spend ten years smoking a pack or more a day (like me!) and then decide to stop, it’ll really really suck. For example, they say that after 24 hours “your sense of taste and smell will return to a normal level.” That’s nice. But, again, if you haven’t been at a “normal” level for years, it’s actually quite unpleasant. And the idea that at 72 hours your “overall energy level will rise” is a fantasy. I’m sure there’s some technical sense in which that may be true, but I spent over a month feeling pereptually drowsy, confused, and un-motivated. The health reason to quit smoking really is “so that you don’t get cancer and die.” But it’s not fun.
The same kind of propaganda is used to dissuade people from using drugs. Now, pointing out the long term health effects of heroin is important. People should not use heroin.
But claiming that heroin is horrible from the get go has a counterproductive effect. Heroin is in fact, I’m told, really really fun at first, which is why people use it. The high is awesome. The problem is that routine use of heroin is really really bad. But saying that heroin is bad all of the time undercuts the real message because people find out that hey, they’ve been lied to, heroin is in fact, awesome at first.