As part of its 2015 "Tips From Former Smokers" campaign, the CDC aired an anti-smoking ad that portrayed ostomies as punishment for a bad habit. This turned out to be part of a larger campaign that took advantage of diseases and complications tied to much more than smoking, twisting life-saving and preventative medical care into something akin to torture. Case in point, an ostomy isn't simply what you get for smoking your way to colorectal cancer. Ostomies also save thousands living with severe, incurable Irritable Bowel Disease (IBD).
I'm a nonsmoker living with IBD, and I work in advertising. When I saw the CDC ad, which capitalized on the fears of those living with a colostomy bag, I didn't think of smokers. I thought of the people I had connected with since my diagnosis who wake up every day and do their best to put aside any shame they might feel -- or be made to feel -- about their ostomy because it's the reason they're able to get out of bed.
As someone who works in advertising, I knew this video wasn't just a one-off. It was part of a $68 million dollar campaign created to scare smokers and the general population with nightmarish health conditions that may arise from smoking. Shaming the millions of nonsmokers living with these painful conditions was an oversight they made in the name of a larger and, it would seem, more important cause.
Crohn's Disease and Ulcerative Colitis (UC) are two conditions characterized as IBD. Crohn's usually causes inflammation in the small bowel and the beginning of the colon, while UC only involves the innermost lining of the colon, creating a continuous trail of painful bleeding ulcers along the large intestine where inflammation is present. Both are debilitating chronic diseases, causing diarrhea, abdominal pain, severe fatigue, weight loss, liver problems, and worse.
Once you fail a tier of medication for IBD, you graduate to the next until you run out of treatment options and are forced to consider surgical removal of your large intestine, a serious and life-altering surgery that requires months of recovery. In place of your large intestine, doctors either create an artificial pouch, which collects waste from inside the body, or an opening through the stomach called an ostomy.
Contrary to what the CDC would like you to believe, an ostomy isn't just something that happens to a person that willfully destroys their body, it's something that happens to someone whose body is being destroyed by something beyond their control. It's a hard decision that someone truly sick, severely dehydrated, and malnourished must make to save themselves from sepsis or death. You don't just get an ostomy because you smoked when you should have quit, letting your life go with each drag. You get it because you want your life back.
Claiming gross insensitivity to those living with ostomies, the United Ostomy Association of America demanded that the CDC rethink such a representation, and they got their way. The CDC edited the ads, removing negative words like "squeamish" and "smelly," claiming their organization "cares deeply about people who struggle with health issues."
In "Tips from Former Smokers," the CDC dramatizes life-saving medications and surgical measures as punishments for conditions like colon cancer, Macular Degeneration, throat cancer, and premature birth, which are all linked to smoking.
The CDC's spot for Macular Degeneration, a condition that causes severe vision loss, spends two whole minutes showing Marlene, a former smoker, receiving eye injections. The whites of Marlene's eyes are markedly yellow and her eyelids are held open by a metal clamp. She describes the sound of the needle entering her eye as an egg cracking and the feeling it gives her as "miserable." Marlene never says whether the injections are actually working to save her vision, but perhaps she wasn't asked.
Other ads introduce people living with asthma, tracheostomies, and lung cancer all receiving treatment for conditions that can occur in smokers and nonsmokers alike. Smoker or nonsmoker, everyone knows by now that smoking is bad for your health. It's just as important to realize that nonsmokers who receive medical treatments for the same conditions as smokers don't consider them to be punishment, but a gift. This medical care can mean the difference between looking out the window and being the person walking by the window, which, to someone with a chronic illness, makes all the difference in the world.
As a copywriter, it's sometimes my job to take a poorly written message and make it clearer. So, here's option two:
I don't smoke. My IBD diagnosis puts me at a higher risk for colon cancer and it comforts me to know that I can have life-saving surgery should I ever need it. An elderly neighbor of mine suffers from Macular Degeneration simply because it runs in her family. She was able to enjoy her vision for much longer than others because she received the same injections as Marlene. I have friends with asthma who are grateful for their inhalers, and I'm sure you could find a lung cancer survivor with praise for the treatments that kept them alive. But that didn't make the cut for "Tips from Former Smokers," and when it comes to empathy, the CDC doesn't either.