No Mickey Mouse Matter

"8. A certain cigarette manufacturer uses a cartoon character in its advertising," write Hartmann and Blass on page 220 (2007) as a factual claim for us to respond to with a proposition that needs a strong supporting argument, or two.

My response is that cigarette manufacturers must be permitted to use the same advertising strategies that are available to the manufacturer of any other product.

Before we allow any government to interfere in people's lives, there must be good reason, and that interference must meet several criteria and standards. First, the facts have to support it. For example, if someone proposes that high school students must have driving lessons in school before they can qualify for a driver's licence and start practising on public roads, there needs to be a survey showing that implementing that proposal does actually improve the driving of young people,  who cause most traffic accidents.

So, does the use of cartoon characters in smoking advertisements even cause children to start smoking? In fact, is there even a correlation that might not be causal between the use of cartoon characters in smoking advertisements and child smoking rates? When Mickey Mouse was emblazoned on packets of candy cigarettes, did that increase the likelihood of child smoking? I'm not sure that there is any solid statistical evidence that it did, so perhaps the popular bans against cartoon characters fail even this first test. When the statistics are checked for the effect of teaching driving skills in high school, the results are clear: accident rates increase.

But even if solid statistics did in fact show a correlation that seemed causal between the use of a cartoon character and an increased incidence of child smoking, is that a good enough reason for a government to interfere in citizens lives to ban it? Popular laws banning some addictive drugs, such as heroin and yaa baa are well known failures: they do not decrease drug and addiction rates and only make all drug related problems much worse; however, even if such laws did in fact reduce drug use and addiction rates, they would still be immoral and should never be done. So, for the rest of my argument, I will assume that children can in fact be influenced by advertisements using cartoon characters to buy the product.

However, ...

to be continued 
I'm much happier with this version than the argument I started while you were writing about Steinbeck's presentation of the shooting of Candy's unhappy dog. I liked the argument I was developing, but it was going to be much too long, and was a bit abstract. 
Had anyone commented, I would not have made the radical revision here, which effectively rewrites it all. But no one had already commented, so it was OK to revise by deleting everything and starting again. I will add more to this version, but I won't delete or make any other radical revision to what's already here. (4:35 PM)

__________

Reference

Hartmann, P. & Blass, L. (2007). Quest 3 Reading and Writing (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.