Mobiles Should Carry a Health Warning

As with cigarettes back in the day when film stars were paid to promote roll ups by being seen looking cool and brooding in their publicity shots, squinting through their curling smoke ream - just conjure up the black and white iconic images of James Dean, Marlene Dietrich, Humphrey Bogart and all the 50's film legends. It is frightening to see how the advertising agencies hoodwinked a generation into believing that these nicotine sticks were 'your friend', which they aimed at lonely housewives when the tobacco companies realised that they'd been rumbled by the men who were dying of lung cancer by then and so went in search of fresh markets. So somehow the fag moved from being cool and sexy into a companion and friend! I was a smoker in my twenties, I thought I was doing it to fit in and to look clever and stay slim as it replaced a meal quite often - well, I was a teenager and it's much like that wanting to be one of the crowd that our smartphones seem to make our teenagers feel like.  My dabbling with smoking led to a twenty-a-day habit as I became a nicotine addict.  It's taken years to stop as habits are difficult to get out of - the addiction however, once recognised as such and admitted to, was easier to kick as I understand that it takes three weeks of abstinence to let the drug fully leave your body thanks to Allen Carr's book How to Stop Smoking. Then you have control of the daily commitment to be fully conscious of your choices and actions.  What chance would I have as a youngster today in this world of constant force feeding of digital information? Aren't we just turning a blind eye and allowing the human race to become digital addicts? Seriously, let's wake up and smell the roses. And my inner voice echoes this sentiment as I hear, "All the while, killing you softly as the advertisements rain down their smiling lies as before".

Today we have truthful photos of bleeding lungs and cancerous growths put on the outside of cigarette packets, 'WARNING: these cigarettes may harm or kill you'. So why doesn't the smartphone carry such a warning?  Why? Haven't scientists yet linked the brain tumours that are now killing our generation to these 'new friends in our pockets' that are doing our heads in, literally. The rise in brain tumours has tripled - I've personally lost more friends to brain tumours than to breast cancer in the past three years - before these tragic deaths I wasn't aware of brain tumours. If science hasn't caught up with these statistics, then I ask why hasn't this connection been made?

I feel there should be a health warning that reads along these lines on all smartphones:

I note that we are lobbying for extra money to help fund the high rise in mental issues - why are we asking the government for the money when we should be looking to some of the major contributors to this phenomenon - the mobile phone manufacturers and service providers. They can’t wash their hands of what they are contributing to. We need to work together and be honest and realistic about these devices which are all too quickly proving to be vices.

DEVICES - take a self-check and find out where you sit on this. We want our mobiles to be something we can depend on, not to become dependent on.