Shock advertising always works. The message of these shock campaigns normally gets through, but it is an expensive business and wears thin on the recipient after some time.

A perfect example was an advertising campaign run by Sedqa in the run up to New Year a few years back. The campaign was extremely effective and involved the feet of a corpse, complete with an identification note round the big toe, lying on a mortuary stretcher.

The idea was: drink and drive and this could be you. There were billboards and the adverts were also run on the backs of buses. Everyone was talking about them and they made an impression on a fair few people.

Eventually it all petered out, but until this day, people still recall the profound effect of the advert and how it stopped them drinking and driving over the holiday season.

This long roundabout introduction brings us to the subject of this editorial – smoking and pictorials of what it can do to you. The government has announced that it will shortly publish a legal notice to make pictorials on cigarette packets obligatory.

Make no mistake, they will be gory, they will be ‘in your face’ and some of the pictures might be disgusting to look at.

But the vast majority of people, smokers included, will agree with this introduction for a good number of reasons. The first of which must be discouraging the younger population from taking up the nasty, dirty habit.

It might not affect everyone, but if we are successful in preventing at least 20 per cent of those under 15 from smoking, we could yield good results.

Alarming figures have shown that while the fraction of the general public who are smokers has dropped to 20 per cent, more young people are lighting up.

In 2006, a startling 42 per cent of 15-year-olds classified themselves as smokers. This was up from 38.8 per cent in 2002. As mentioned above, if we can put off just a few, it would help no end in cleaning up the final figure. Prevention is better than cure, and any fully-fledged smoker can back this up. The vast majority of smokers (if not all) will tell you that they wish they had never lit up in the first place, full stop.

Another reason why these pictorials are good is that they might help give a smoker that final push in order to kick the habit. Again, it might not affect everyone, but it will surely help to convert some people, at least.

Contrary to what a lot of people think, smokers do not believe themselves to be invincible. They know it is a dirty, smelly and dangerous habit. They know that it causes lung cancer, throat cancer and mouth cancer and they also know of the dangers it poses to the cardiovascular system. They just need that extra something to give up for good. Perhaps (and this is no exaggeration), pictures of rotten lungs, stained teeth and mouths, rotting flesh and cancers are just, excuse the pun, what the doctor ordered.

If a smoker has to see these images every time he delves into his pocket, it might just prove to be the final push that each and every one needs to quit.

This newspaper believes that since the introduction of these pictorials is essential, it should be pushed through as quickly as possible and must then be enforced.