THE fact that California has banned smoking in public places has clearly not stopped Hollywood stars from lighting up in theatres – albeit on screen. Smoking in movies is back, and it is seemingly affecting teenagers.
When Annemarie Charlesworth and Stanton Glantz at the University of California, San Francisco, reviewed 40 studies on the effects on teenagers of on-screen smoking they found that the number of times people were seen smoking in US-made movies has soared since 1990. It is now as common as it was in 1950.
More disturbingly, the number of such scenes shown in films with US ratings G, PG and PG-13, which children are allowed to watch, has increased since the mid-90s, significantly increasing the number of adolescents who see stars smoking.
Advertisement
Previous studies suggest that adolescents are up to three times as likely to light up if they have watched films packed with smoking scenes as they are after watching films showing little or no smoking. “Getting smoking out of youth-rated movies is the simplest and least expensive thing that can be done to reduce adolescent smoking,” Glantz says.
