TUESDAY, June 2, 2009 (Health.com) — Blockbuster movies are less likely to portray smokers than they have in the past, according to a new study. What’s more, this decline in on-screen smoking may have occurred in tandem with a drop in the number of adolescents who have lit up in real life.
While the study can’t prove that one is related to the other, the findings would seem to support what critics have long said: Smoking by glamorous (or even not-so-glamorous) people on the silver screen is like free advertising for cigarettes.
A second study, also published in a letter in this week’s Journal of the American Medical Association, suggests that the portrayal of gun use has slightly declined in children’s movies as well.
“Reducing smoking in movies probably helped to reduce rates of smoking in kids,” says study author James D. Sargent, MD, a professor of pediatrics at Dartmouth Medical School and the codirector of the Cancer Control Research Program at Norris Cotton Cancer Center, both in Lebanon, N.H. “We are on the right track aiming at movies, yet half of movies still contain smoking and more work needs to be done.”
About one-third to one-half of adolescents who begin smoking may do so because they see smoking in the movies, some research suggests, and the tobacco industry has spent big bucks in the past to make sure cigarettes appeared in popular movies, according to Smoke Free Movies, a University of California San Francisco project. For years, public health groups have encouraged the movie industry to voluntarily reduce depictions of smoking.
Next page: Smoking drops among 8th graders
Comments (0)