Pack it in

So Big Tobacco has lost its appeal. Well, we knew that 25 years ago - smoking's been totes uncool since Bag The Fag.



...anyhow* Overly Large Tobacco have been shitcanned in their attempts to prevent the Strayan Gummint from enacting legislation which would force all cigarettes to be sold in plain olive- or khaki-green packaging. As the NT News pointed out, this should dramatically reduce rates of smoking in their readership catchment: PUTTING CIGS IN KHAKI PACK LIKELY TO HELP CUT DOWN NT SMOKERS. HARD TO FIND KHAKI PACK IN KHAKI SHORTS, SHIRT, BAG, HOUSE.

Putting everyone's durries in matching phlegmy-coloured cardboard of course makes all of Dimensionally Extraneous Tobacco's attempts at brand differentiation worthless and pointless. Noone will know that you fancy yourself as a Marlboro man, riding roughshod through the untamed wilderness of Montana, despite being a bespectacled 43 year old tax accountant from Burwood with a 1998 Camry and erectile dysfunction.

...IN MY PANTS

Unless.

You know where this is going to go, people: the same way it always does. Humans can't handle the inability to differentiate their status by the shiny shit they carry around. From laptop skins to Xmas reindeer antlers on family wagons, people be taking their standard-issue identikit units of consumption and personalising the very merry fuck thereoutof. Expect the humble cigarette tin to make one grand motherfucker of a comeback, from its fringe populations in the hipsterland communities of Newtown and North Fitzroy. Think of them as iPhone cases for the cancerous-elect.

More to the point, there's probably a huge opportunity for the peeps who do good business out of recreating ciggy logos for models of race cars (now legally required to be sold without the insignias of the brands which sponsored the teams in question back in the day) to run off reams of stickers to be sold at newsagents along side the khaki-clad FATAL DEATH BRINGING CANCER STICKS OF FATAL CANCER BRINGING DEATH. You want to show the world you're on a Holiday to Freeport with your old mate Peter Stuyvesant? Peel the stickers, slap 'em on, slot the pack into a prominent shirt pocket, and as a prominent brand of the '80s would have it, You're Laughing.

Or, for the tight-arses (or the fashionably obtuse), there's always the option of a B&H-gold Sharpie from the stationary counter.

Extra hipster points for neat colouring in.

The Doctor is OUT.