YOU GOT TO ADMIT that the latest anti-smoking campaign in France is powerful. Stupid, but powerful: "To smoke is to be a slave of tobacco"

(via)

UPDATE. Eric Scheie has the "sanitized" version. And there's indeed a paradox: if the mere public depiction of cigarettes in France is banned (movie posters, etc -- even Lucky Luke, who started munching pieces of straw and even sported a nicotine patch for a while), it's odd that cigarettes appear so conspicuously in the ad. Yeah, I know it's precisely made to demonize them, but still...

UPDATE II. More at The Independent. I found this even more silly than the ad itself:

Marco de la Fuente, the leader of the project for the BDDP et Fils ad agency, said: "The old arguments – tobacco is bad for you – don't work any more. The message here is that tobacco is a form of submission. In the popular imagination, oral sex is the perfect symbol of submission." 

Oral sex, in general, a symbol of submission? No qualifiers? Also when it's not forced? Wow, I didn't know the French had become a bunch of prudes...