If Anything Will Make You Quit Smoking, It's This

That cigarette smoking is or has ever been perceived as cool (so cool that at one point nearly half of American adults smoked) is a horrifying and fascinating victory of the advertising industry. I don't know a single person who enjoyed their first cigarette and most people I know had to struggle to acquire a taste for them. But the adolescent siren song of having our coolness validated is a powerful thing, and decades of marketing had done the job. "The Message from the Lungs," a PSA from the Thai Health Promotion Foundation delivers an intense message to smokers (90% of whom say they want to quit smoking) by showing bottles and bottles of ink made from one smoker's lungs. So many feels, many of them basically non-verbal and monosyllabic, like "Ew!" and "Ack!" and "Wow!" and just a big long massive body shudder.

In partnership with the Faculty of Medicine at Chulalongkorn University, the Thai Health Promotion Foundation made the ink from the lungs of a man who smoked for 50 years. They extracted the black substance to make the ink, bottled it, and put it on public display to encourage smokers to quit. People were encouraged to write empowering messages to fellow smokers about the importance of quitting with the ink, literally creating a message from one man's body as a cautionary tale.

The project was covered extensively by Thai media and shared over 100,000 times on social media outlets.

The PSA (in English) can be found below. Feel free to go head and share it with anyone who has pushed back their quit date one time too many.

Images: Getty Images; Vimeo