Hitting Below the Belt

The minute I stepped off the airplane in Cairo, I was assaulted with an indefinable musk of sweet incense, cigarettes and... something else burning, like trash or a tire. Some people refer to this gentle smoky bouquet as "pollution," but I like to think of it as the smell of development. Mmm...

So yes, Cairo smells like a grandpa, and this might just be because 60% of the male population in Egypt (2% of the female population...reportedly) smokes; to put this into perspective, about 24% of the male population in America smokes. Yowzah! While Egypt is one of the top 15 "smoking" countries in the world, it's also one of the 12 countries (along with Canada, Jordan, and Brazil) that require cigarette packs to bear labels with graphic warnings about the hazards of smoking.

Needless to say, pictures of blackened lungs, diseased tongues, and children coughing were not enough to deter the majority of male smokers in Egypt, who normally start chain smoking at the age of ten and continue the manly habit until their mysterious and untimely deaths a few decades later. (What gives?) So the government decided to hit the men of Egypt where it would actually hurt: below the belt.

Yes, that's right folks. In August 2008, Egypt launched a campaign of cigarette labels with the warning that smoking causes impotence. Take a look at the label:


Loosely translated, the label explains that smoking "will gonna cause you the impotence, guy." Ok just kidding. It actually says that "long-term smoking has an affect on marital relations." But I guess as long as it's all within the bonds of marriage we're good, right?

Apparently not. I've been trying to find some figures about the effectiveness of these new labels thus far, but have had no luck. Again, the stats might not be conclusive, as this is a relatively new campaign. What I do know, however, is that the influence of these warnings was independently tested before production, and the impotence label was the most effective out of all of the disease and death-related labels. Well done.

Why stop there? Why not correlate the burning of cigarettes to one's future of burning in hell? Smoking kills. Nay, smoking damns.

Thanks to Karim for the tip off... not because he saw the labels when he was in Egypt and told me about it, but because he found out the hard way that smoking causes impotence.