Well, I love smokin' and drinkin' so I love the decks associated with them. Tobacco advertising is always kinda weird, though. I grew up watching videos of old 'Hamlet' commercials because my Grandfather (who died when I was 7; non-smoker, had a thing for salt) had a VHS tape of them all. There were still billboard adverts etc. when I was growing up. They're pretty funny, actually. I just always feel it's funny seeing tobacco adverts generally, like one of the characters should stop and say 'You know this kills you, right? What are you talking about?!'.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzM1iPYnxfU
Those were kind of funny - though I didn't hear them, just saw them. The PC @ work has no speakers.
Advertising for tobacco died quickly here. TV ads for cigarettes and hard alcohol products were gone either before I was born or while I was too young to remember (1960s or early '70s). Cigar TV ads were gone by sometime in the mid-'80s. We still have beer and wine ads on TV, but Federal regulations stipulate that no one can be seen actually consuming the beverages on-screen. Tobacco billboard advertising was pulled at some point in the 1990s, as well as magazine ads - it was a chain reaction, starting with the "Joe Camel" cartoon character, which led to no cartoon mascots, then culminated in the leaked documents showing how tobacco companies knew the deadliness of their products and not only continued to push them but were illegally aiming their advertising at children in order to get them addicted before they were old enough to have a sense of their own mortality. Hard liquor ads have returned, but only on cable television, not broadcast - the regulations are different when the broadcasters are using private sat-links and privately-owned wires instead of the public airwaves to transmit programming, because you have to pay to have cable TV delivered to your home, thus you have the right to refuse by canceling your service.
Those are some pretty funny ads, and while not really convincing, they must have been successful in making people think of their brand.
@Sabacc, I'm kind of in the same thinking for smoking-related decks, but I still have some interest in trying the vslims because of all the talk about their handling. As for alcohol-related ones... While the choice of not drinking is respectable, wine itself isn't a bad thing so much as its abuse. I don't see anything wrong with promoting it so long as you're not promoting the act of getting drunk, which is a completely different thing.
I have never been drunk even once in my 19 years and don't intend to anytime soon, but I do quite like the occasional vodka-based drink at parties and such(though I dislike the taste of both wine and beer in general.)
And before you ask, the legal age here is 18, not 21.
I'll be frank - the moral position I took stemmed not just from within, but from without; from living in a family that has a history of alcohol abuse and has had many deaths or serious operations as a result of cigarette-induced cancers.
My father had lung cancer in the early '90s, which he fought off by rounds of chemo and the removal of half of his lung capacity. He managed to quit smoking for about a month before returning to it. I tried getting him to stop by giving him patches and nicotine gum, but he never used them correctly and gave up on them, willfully. He lived for a little over a decade after that, eventually contracting first type II diabetes (which he never adequately treated), then pancreatic cancer - which, incidentally, has a survival rate of <5%, and then only if detected early, which his wasn't.
The man was a crochety pain in the ass, emotionally abusive, and his last words to be before dying were, "Get the f*** out of here." But he was my father, and I still miss him. He might have still been here if advertising and cultural attitudes were different in his youth.
My mother and brother were both diagnosed as bipolar, which led them to abuse alcohol, painkillers and illegal drugs. My mother chose to take control of the situation by canceling all her pain med prescriptions and getting treatment, while my brother is a wanted fugitive believed to have fled the country, possibly moving to his wife's former home country. She was Chinese, but lived her life in Singapore before moving to America.
His crimes aren't terribly serious, but they were both long-term unemployed, with him practically being unemployable due to his untreated disorder - he refuses treatment, despite having a few episodes resulting in hospitalization and even arrest. He was planning to move to Singapore because he believed that it would be easier to make a living there.
I've had issues myself dealing with depression, and some binge-drinking related to it, but I'm on the other side of it now. My depression is well in check, and I quit drinking even before I was forced to due to having to take blood thinners to treat a genetic clotting disorder that runs rampant on my mother's side of the family. I'm in better physical condition and happier now than at any point previous aside from my youngest childhood years, for which I can thank therapy, aikido, Zen and my loving, understanding, accepting fiancee, Anya.