Will gruesome photos on cigarette packs work?

I see where they're now planning to put gruesome photos of diseased lungs, a man exhaling smoke through a hole in his throat, even a corpse on packages of cigarettes.

It should be enough to make a smoker want to quit.

However, whether or not it will work is questionable.

After all, it's hard to believe that any reasonably intelligent smoker today doesn't already know that smoking is "hazardous" to his or her life.

The labels have been proclaiming for years that cigarettes not only cause lung cancer but also increase the risk of heart disease, emphysema, bronchitis and a number of other life-threatening illnesses.

However, like the proverbial ostrich hiding its head in the sand, many smokers choose to believe that the warnings don't apply to them.

Of course, it's not easy to quit. I know from experience.

But, at least back in the late 1930s, when my childhood pal Mickey and I lit our first cigarette behind the garage of my home in Bergenfield – a Chesterfield I had swiped from dad's pack – there were no warnings on the packs.

Oh, we were told that smoking would "stunt our growth," but we didn't take that seriously.

Parents told kids stuff like that all the time.

However, I didn't really care much for that first cigarette.

It wasn't until a few years later, during World War II, that I really began to smoke. Everybody did.

Heck, you never saw a picture of anybody in the movies without a cigarette dangling from their lips; and radio commercials extolled the pleasures, and even the benefits, of smoking.

Now, I'm not usually a believer in "conspiracy theories," but I've often thought that, knowingly or not, the government cooperated with the tobacco industry during World War II in a program that was intended to hook an entire generation on cigarettes.

Oh, the publicized motive was patriotic…you know, an unselfish effort by the tobacco industry to see that cigarettes were available to the nation's servicemen and women wherever they were.

They were even included with C-rations. Or, if you were overseas, you could buy a pack for only a nickel.

More than 16 million served in the U.S armed forces during World War II and, when that war ended, it's fair to say that a majority of those returning were addicted to nicotine.

The fact that cigarette sales reached an all-time high in the years that followed supports that claim.

The first official report on the dangers of smoking was issued by the surgeon general in 1964.