Hello.
My name is David Lippman. I am a an internal medicine physician
and founder of Grace Under Fire, LLC an organization focused
on decreasing teenage smoking and preventive medicine. I am medical
director of a federally qualified healthcare center in Evansville, In.
Jack first came to me over 4 years ago. Before medical school,
my beautiful mother who was a heavy smoker died of lung cancer.
As a physician, I often felt powerless to help many of my patients
who were dying from the diseases caused by tobacco. I began
to feel it was more important to stop people from smoking rather
than trying to treat the horrible diseases that smoking causes.
As I learned about tobacco, I began to realize that most people
become smokers as adolescents. They don’t smoke to destroy
their body or themselves; they smoke to become part of an “in”
group, or to express their individuality or rebelliousness against
parental authority. However, this is merely an image “sold”
by tobacco companies, and the reality is teenagers become addicted
to a deadly product which only profits the tobacco industry.
It was also interesting to learn the great effect peer pressure
played in creating teenage smokers.
Jack Jackass, and his cadre of smoking friends, such as Stroked
Out Sal(amander), Betty Butt, Gerry Jackass, Doc Dimwit and
Nurse Nitwit, ridicule the image of social success that tobacco
companies market. For younger kids they are merely objects of
ridicule meant to incite laughter. For older individuals these
characters hopefully can be used to deconstruct the advertising
images that tobacco companies so successfully sell.
Saving lives, saving kids, it’s what Jack Jackass is all
about. |
