Smoking On Screen: USA Movies Page 2

By Jonathan On Jul 5, 2017

Smoking in the movies update

Read More:? USA Movies Page 3
http://www.smokersclubinc.com/modules.php?name=News&file;=article&sid;=4944

Never mind the zealots: smoking has a role in film
2 June 2008
Public health academic Simon Chapman writes
Some of my colleagues, intoxicated with the success of downward spiralling smoking and lung cancer rates, are turning their attention to getting smoking either banned from movies (legislation is pending in Bollywood and all smoking on Thai TV is now pixelated) or slapped with an R-rating, assuring box office oblivion. The Australian Medical Association now suggests that state and federal government funding be withdrawn from films that “glamorise, feature or promote smoking”.
There’s a growing body of research that shows growing depictions of smoking in movies, and that kids who watch lots of movies smoke more than those who don’t, even after the studies control for social class and measures of parental strictness and supervision. The tobacco industry, starved of orthodox advertising vehicles, sees product placement in movies as a lifeline.
Professor Stan Glantz from the University of California, who has done much of this research and maintains an advocacy website on it, says simply “I just want smoking to be treated like the word f-ck in movies”. Others point to the longstanding classification of illicit drug use, hard-end violence and sustained humpy-rumpy as tickets to R-certification. Tobacco kills five million worldwide a year, so why not treat smoking scenes like injecting drug scenes?
But should movies, books, drama and entertainment generally be seen as simply part of some ideological state apparatus for promoting health, to be appropriated at will? If such precedents are set, awkward questions immediately arise about every single-issue “please don’t” area. No more shoot-outs, car chases, misogyny, cruelty to animals, racism, gluttony, sloth, unsafe s-x and anything promoting extreme, dangerous sport or leisure like mountaineering. Impressionable kids might get the wrong idea; movies would become nothing but anodyne vehicles for wholesome values. The Pyongyang Film School, the mecca for budding screenwriters and directors wanting to know all about falling in line with government policy.Over the weekend, I watched In Her Shoes (with Cameron Diaz, Toni Collette, and Shirley MacLaine). Diaz plays an insect thin, dyslexic, rudderless younger sister of Collette’s character. They have had an emotional roller-coaster of a childhood, and the film takes us through a six-box-of-tissues resolution as they become acquainted with their estranged grandmother (MacLaine).
At one stage, Diaz reaches for a cigarette. The sagacious MacLaine says “you shouldn’t smoke. You have a history of lung cancer in your family”. MacLaine takes the cigarette away, as a grandmother can. The scene said to me: many semi-anorexic, confused, glamorous young women smoke, and here is a scriptwriter taking the effort to make a point that we can all applaud.
But it struck me that if the movement to get all non-historical depictions of smoking R certificated (Churchill’s cigar is safe), then this powerful moment would be relegated to R-certificate. If that had happened, then perhaps thousands of young people around the world, lured by Diaz’s box office appeal in this and other movies, would be denied the richly contextualised and powerful message that the movie delivers: people who smoke are often very glam and cool, and drip with attitude but, like Diaz, they are often drifting, confused, and in the end, not particularly attractive characters. Hardly ideal role models that we ought to be rushing about trying to stamp into R certificated oblivion.
Would a panel of smoking classification adjudicators give this a green light as a state-sanctioned depiction of smoking because it didn’t actually show smoking, but just referred to it as it was about to happen? But what if Diaz had smoked heavily throughout the film, and then MacLaine had made the same powerful point and Diaz had stopped? What would the panel have rated the film? There would have been 40 minutes of glam-smoking, with one poignant moment that precipitated an apparent rethink for Diaz. Presumably the censors’ red pens would have rapidly doomed it as R.
I cannot imagine a smoking scenes panel who could ever dream up a code of on-screen smoking conduct that would be able to anticipate the richness through which creative people in cinema, literature and popular culture can codify complex narratives about smoking, for better or for worse. When we step into the dark waters of literary censorship, we need to be very sure of what we are doing.
Simon Chapman is professor of public health at the University of Sydney and last week won the NSW Premier’s prize for outstanding cancer research.

New York wants age limit on films with smoking scenes
2/20/08

NEW YORK (AFP) — New York state health authorities launched a campaign Tuesday urging major film studio owners to protect children from seeing movies with smoking scenes.

In full page advertisements in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, Health Commissioner Richard Daines said films showing tobacco use should get an “R” rating, which requires children under 17 to be accompanied by an adult.

But he did suggest an exception for films that show the dangers of tobacco use or depict the smoking habit of a historical figure.

“Exposure to smoking in movies is the single most powerful pro-tobacco influence on children today, accounting for the recruitment of half of all new adolescent smokers,” Daines said in the ad.

Anti-Smoking Group Claims that 340 Young People Die Each Day from Seeing Smoking in Movies

http://tobaccoanalysis.blogspot.com/2007/10/anti-smoking-group-claims-that-340.html

Breathe California of Sacramento-Emigrant Trails Still Claiming that Smoking Kills 340 Young People Every Day

http://tobaccoanalysis.blogspot.com/2007/12/breathe-california-of-sacramento.html

Michael Siegel, MD, MPH

Professor

Associate Chair of Academics

Social and Behavioral Sciences Department

Boston University School of Public Health

Exposure To Smoking In Movies Influences Kids Lighting Up, New Research Suggests
ScienceDaily (Jan. 18, 2008) — New research from Dartmouth Medical School (DMS) strengthens the case that children’s exposure to smoking in movies influences their decision to start smoking. It further suggests that smoking in movies seen in early childhood has an equally significant impact on that decision as movie smoking exposure closer to adolescence. The study, published in the January issue of Pediatrics, was the first of its kind to focus on elementary school children, and the first to update the children’s exposure to movie smoking over time.
Lead author is Dr. Linda Titus-Ernstoff, a professor of community and family medicine and of pediatrics at Dartmouth Medical School (DMS), and the associate director of the Hood Center for Children and Families. The research team surveyed more than 2,200 children ages 9-12 from 26 schools in New Hampshire and Vermont. Children were asked about movies they had seen and their smoking behavior at an initial baseline survey and at two follow-up surveys. Children who had already tried smoking before the baseline survey were not included in the follow-up surveys.
At the baseline survey, children were given randomly sampled lists containing 50 of the 550 top box office movies over the prior 5.5 years and asked which movies they had seen. Children were interviewed again in two follow-up surveys, one and two years later, about their smoking behavior and the movies they had seen based on updated lists of 50 of the 200 top box office movies and video rentals during the previous year.
By the third survey, 10 percent of the children had initiated smoking. Results from the three surveys showed that each child had seen an average of 37 out of the 150 popular movies they were asked about, exposing them to an average of 150 smoking occurrences. About 80 percent of the children’s exposure was due to smoking images portrayed in youth-rated movies (G, PG, PG-13).
“The results indicated that the earliest exposure to movie smoking was as important as exposure measured at the two follow-ups in predicting children’s smoking initiation,” said Titus-Ernstoff. “This finding suggests that the process which leads children to initiate smoking begins much earlier than adolescence. Viewing smoking in the movies may influence the decision to smoke in more than a third of children.”
The take-home message from this study is that exposure to movie smoking occurring during early childhood is as influential as exposure that occurs nearer to the time of smoking initiation, Titus-Ernstoff says. Even young children who see smoking in movies may be at risk for smoking later on. Parents also need to be aware, she adds, that most of children’s exposure to movie smoking comes from youth-rated movies, and that they should try to reduce their children’s viewing of movies that contain smoking.
Study co-authors of the study include Drs. Madeline Dalton, who led the research study, Anna Adachi-Mejia, Meghan R. Longacre and Michael Beach, all with Dartmouth Medical School. Additionally, Dalton is director of the Hood Center for Children and Families, and Adachi-Mejia is assistant director of the Center ‘s Community Health Research Program; Beach is with the Department of Anesthesiology at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.

Sesame Street DVD is for adults only

DVD censorship gets out of hand

19 November 2007

THE POWERS that be have decided that the early versions of the kids’ show Sesame Street are too racy for kids of today.

The earliest episodes, bought you by the number 2 and the letter E, were installed onto DVD last week. But horror of horrors Mr Cooper, it is rated adults only.

According to the publisher, early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”

Having grown up on never-ending episodes of Sesame Street, one has to wonder what it was that was so terrible that we saw, that kids of today can’t cope with.

In those days it was ok to for Cookie monster’s eating disorder to go untreated, for Sally to take a stranger’s hand and go to his home, for Oscar the Grouch to be denied prozac, and for blokes living together, Ernie and Bert, to engage in domestic violence.

But Executive producer Carol-Lynn Parente told the New York Times that the main reason for the censorship was nothing to do with anything we could come up with.

It was to do with a famous scene, often repeated, called Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, had a pipe which he later ate.

Modern producers felt that modelled the wrong behaviour. It encouraged smoking and eating pipes. Initially they re-shot the scenes and later it was dropped.

Another reason was that when Snuffleupagus first appeared, he was invisble to all but Big Bird. But later producers decided it was a little creepy to have the giant canary wandering around claiming he was not hallucinating all the time.

Anti-Smoking Group Claims that 390,000 Youths Die Each Year Due to Smoking in Movies
October 26, 2007? By Michael Siegel
The same anti-smoking group which is publicly claiming that 340 young people die each day from smoking is also claiming that 390,000 youths die each year due to smoking in movies.

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Lighting up at the movies
The Walt Disney Co. caves to suspect studies and censorship — and it won’t stop kids from smoking.

July 27, 2007
By Jacob Sullum

By agreeing to make its family-oriented movies smoke-free and “discourage” smoking in films distributed under its Touchstone and Miramax brands, the Walt Disney Co. has implicitly endorsed the claim that smoking on the screen leads to smoking in real life.

While that connection may sound intuitively appealing, there is little reason to believe that decisions like Disney’s will have a noticeable effect on smoking rates.

Reporting on Disney’s new policy, Reuters cited research finding that “children with the highest exposure to smoking in movies were nearly three times more likely to start smoking.” Anti-smoking activists, such as UC San Francisco professor Stanton A. Glantz, who runs the Smoke Free Movies project, go even further, asserting that cinematic cigarettes account for 52% of smoking initiation and that an automatic R-rating for movies with smoking “would cut movie smoking’s effect on kids in half, saving 50,000 lives a year in the U.S. alone.”

Those claims are based on a 2003 Lancet study that found 10- to 14-year-olds who had seen movies with many smoking scenes were more likely to try cigarettes than kids who had seen movies with fewer smoking scenes. The problem with attributing this association to cinematic smoking is that it’s impossible to control for differences in personality and environment that make kids more likely to see movies with a lot of smoking in them, which already tend to be R-rated movies.

The study did take into account measures of “sensation-seeking,” “rebelliousness” and “self-esteem,” as well as “social influences” and “parenting characteristics.” But it’s unrealistic to suppose that such measures fully account for all the relevant differences. To put it another way, something distinguishes kids who see a lot of R-rated movies from kids who don’t, and whatever it is — parental permissiveness, attraction to adult themes, a tendency to act out — may also affect their inclination to smoke.

Methodological difficulties aside, the size of movies’ alleged effect is implausibly large, to put it mildly. Glantz says cinematic smoking accounts for even more real-life smoking than advertising does: 52% versus 34%. Is it even conceivable that exposure to movies and advertising causes 86% of smoking? That all other factors in life, including peers, parents and personality, together contribute only 14%?

At least as offensive as such patently absurd claims is the premise that every filmmaker should make his work conform to the dictates of anti-smoking activists. While Disney wishfully asserts that “cigarette smoking is a unique problem,” how will it respond when activists demand that it eliminate scenes depicting sloth, gluttony and helmetless bike or motorcycle riding from its movies in order to promote public health?

Artistically speaking, there is something to be said for depicting people as they actually are, as opposed to the way they would be if avoiding disease and injury were always their top priority. And when it comes to smoking, movies reflect reality more accurately than anti-smoking activists claim. Overall, according to a 2005 study in the journal Chest, “contemporary American movies do not have a higher prevalence of smoking than the general U.S. population.”

The study also found that “bad guys” were more likely to smoke than “good guys” and that, as in real life, smoking was associated with lower socioeconomic status. “Most investigators have concluded that smoking is portrayed as glamorous and positive,” the lead author said, “but our study shows that the exact opposite is true.”

Interestingly, the researchers reported that smoking was especially common in independent films, a fact they said may be because of the “anti-establishment or free-spirited” character of such movies. If anyone is making smoking seem cool, it’s self-righteous busybodies like Stanton Glantz.

Jacob Sullum, a senior editor at Reason magazine, is the author of “For Your Own Good: The Anti-Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health” (Free Press).

Disney Bans Smoking, Less Quick To Ban Tim Allen
hecklerspray – London,UK
However, this new Disney smoking ban will be problematic for at least one Disney production – Pixar’s follow-up to Ratatouille. …

No more smoking? Ban this (and this)
Chicago Tribune – United States
Disney can cite various studies to justify its move to ban smoking in family movies and to discourage it in older-skewing Touchstone and Miramax films: …

Disney Bans Smoking
July 25, 2007

Smoking is a funny thing. In fact, everything is funnier with a cigarette. Example – guy riding down the street on a bike. Not funny. Guy ridding down the street on a bike with a cigarette hanging from his mouth – funny. It’s a sign of desperation and complete submission to an addiction. In recent years, this comic device has been assaulted with anti-smoking campaigns. All Americans are, by now, familiar with Stand – the anti-smoking group. The funniest thing is that, while smoking is bad for you, it doesn’t tear apart families like alcohol. How many commercials have you seen today that glorified alcohol?

Now this anti-smoking agenda is spilling into the cinema. Back in May, Josh ranted about the the MPAA campaigning for an R rating with any film that has smoking in it. Today, Yahoo! reported that Disney has banned all depictions of smoking from its films – the first Hollywood studio to do so. Additionally, Disney will “discourage” smoking in films from its Touchstone and Miramax labels. And, Disney Chief Executive Robert Iger also said that the studio would place anti-smoking public service announcements on DVDs of any future films that feature cigarette smoking.

While the first reaction to this type of censorship is extreme anger, it highlights the programmed mentality of Hollywood and audiences. Market segments are targeted and then sold entertainment in the forms of movies. Disney is primarily a family-oriented mass producer of movie entertainment, it’s really no surprise that they would jump on a popular public agenda.

If you’re anything like me, when you hear this kind of news or see some anti-smoking commercial smacking you in the face with some “staggering statistics,” your first reaction is to run out and buy and smoke a pack of cigarettes just because you don’t like being told what is right and wrong. Then again, with the legislation banning smoking in public places passed in many states and this trend in cinema censorship, the anti-smoking agenda seems to be our generations red scare.

Perhaps our government and corporations are just preparing us for a uniform future, where we all look the same, think the same and wear those sweet silver jumpsuits on our way to the moon or a neighboring planet. Or it could just be the man trampling on your God given right to smoke a damn cigarette if you want to.

Disney-branded films to ban depictions of smoking
July 25, 2007

Walt Disney Co. on Wednesday became the first major Hollywood studio to ban depictions of smoking, saying there would be no smoking in its family-oriented, Disney-branded films and it would “discourage” it in films distributed by its Touchstone and Miramax labels.

Disney Chief Executive Robert Iger also said in a letter to U.S. Rep. Edward Markey, whose committee last month held hearings on the effects of movie images on children, that the studio would place anti-smoking public service announcements on DVDs of any future films that feature cigarette smoking.

He said the company would encourage theater owners to show screen anti-smoking public service announcements, or PSAs, before such films.

Iger cautioned, however, that “cigarette smoking is a unique problem and this PSA effort is not a precedent for any other issue.”

Markey described Disney’s commitment as “groundbreaking” and urged other studios to follow suit.

Dr. Cheryl Healton, president and CEO of the American Legacy Foundation, commended Disney’s move but said the studio left “some ambiguity about what would happen in relation to Touchstone and Miramax.”

Research cited by American Legacy, a nonprofit created out of landmark litigation between the tobacco industry and states attorneys general, shows that 90 percent of all films depict smoking and children with the highest exposure to smoking in movies were nearly three times more likely to start smoking.

Tobacco is featured in three-quarters of G, PG and PG-13 rated movies and 90 percent of R-rated movies, the studies showed.

The independent Weinstein Co. already is using PSAs produced by American Legacy ahead of its films that depict smoking, Healton said.

Anti-Smoking Groups Up in Arms Over Failure to Give “Hairspray” an R-Rating Due to Momentary Teen Smoking
July 27, 2007? By Michael Siegel
Anti-smoking groups are apparently up in arms over the decision by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to give the new movie “Hairspray” only a PG rating (instead of an R rating) due to its depiction of momentary teen smoking.

‘HAIRSPRAY’ GETS A CIG-NATURE RATING

July 12, 2007
By LOU LUMENICK

‘HAIRSPRAY” is the first movie to be cited for a smoking scene under the movie ratings board’s new policy – and anti-smoking forces are burned up because it only got a lenient PG.

The film version of the Broadway musical starring John Travolta, opening July 20, is rated PG (parental guidance suggested) for “language, some suggestive content and momentary teen smoking.”

Set in Baltimore of the 1960s, the flick includes a fleeting scene of smoking in a high school bathroom. There are also brief shots of a character billed in the credits as “smoking teacher” in a faculty lounge, as well as pregnant mothers smoking and drinking during a musical number.

When the Motion Picture Association of America’s ratings board announced it would add smoking as a criterion in May, it specifically said “historic or other mitigating context” would be considered.

The “Hairspray” rating was criticized by anti-smoking groups, who have been calling for a mandatory R rating for all films that depict smoking, on the grounds that such scenes encourage teen smoking.

“I don’t know that just because a movie takes place in the ’60s that it justifies a PG, since 14- and 15-year-olds are in the bull’s-eye for the cigarette market,” says Sheryl Healton, president of American Legacy Foundation. “It’s really unfortunate and a disappointingly anemic response to a public health problem.”

“It’s an issue we take very seriously,” responds Seth Oster, a spokesman for the MPAA. “Parents have more information now than ever before. If smoking is pervasive enough, it could result in the movie’s rating to be moved up.”

The ratings board has given PG-13 ratings for three upcoming movies that include smoking, and awarded PG ratings to three others for reasons including “brief” smoking.

PG? Parental Guidance Suggested
Some Material May Not Be Suitable for Children
Language, Some Suggestive Content
and Momentary Teen Smoking

Anti-smoking adverts at the movies not effective on smokers?

June 12, 2007

London, June 12 : Showing anti-smoking advertisements before movies in which the lead character smokes is not as effective a method as campaigners hope, for the only people such adverts really reduce the appeal of smoking to, are non-smokers.

And, the news comes from a study that appears in the June issue of the journal Tobacco Control.

The study was carried on 3,000 cinemagoers, 18.6 percent of whom were current smokers, aged 12-24 years in Australia, over a period of three weeks.

The researchers found that after three weeks, though the number of non-smokers who said that they would stay away from taking up the butt increased from 43.8 percent to 47.8 percent, smokers said that there would be no change in their habits, with 38.6 percent of those who saw the anti-smoking adverts saying that they were still likely to be smoking a year on.

The authors concluded that while antismoking advertisement before movies can help stop non-smokers from taking up the butt, campaigners and health experts need to come up with new, innovative methods to woo smokers away from the habit.

“Placing an antismoking advertisement before movies that contain smoking scenes can help to immunise young non-smokers against the influences of film stars smoking,” the BMJ quoted them, as stating.

In fact, the researchers warn that anti-smoking campaign just might have the opposite effect on smokers, making them more determined to keep up the habit.

“The finding that a higher proportion of smokers in the intervention group reported they were likely to be smoking in the future suggests that the antismoking advertisement could have in fact increased stated intentions to smoke,” they state.

“Caution must be exercised in the type of advertisement screened as some types of advertising may reinforce smokers’ intentions to smoke,” they add.

Free expression gets smoked

May 17, 2007
Steve Chapman
The 1st Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of the press, takes the view that the people should dictate to the government, not the other way around. But no one told a group of 32 state attorneys general, who have taken it upon themselves to instruct the film industry on the appropriate content of movies.

This time, the cause is not raunchy sex, foul language or blood-spattering violence. It’s cigarettes. Many experts think that when actors puff away, they cause teenagers to do likewise. One study went so far as to say that 38 percent of all kids who acquire the habit do so because of the influence of films. So all these state government officials want filmmakers to stop depicting tobacco use.

They evidently have had an effect. Not long after the attorneys general sent a letter requesting action, the Motion Picture Association of America agreed to use smoking in determining each film’s rating. “Depictions that glamorize smoking or movies that feature pervasive smoking outside of a historic or other mitigating context” would run afoul of the ratings board. Apparently it would be OK to show an unwashed lowlife taking a drag just before he drops dead of a heart attack.

The MPAA didn’t go as far as demanded by some anti-tobacco groups that want to slap an R rating on just about every film in which actors light up. But it accepted the basic principle that public health lobbyists and politicians should have a big role in deciding what people will see, instead of letting the industry merely cater to its audience.

It’s hard to fully credit the notion that kids start smoking just because they see Scarlett Johansson doing it. Steven Milloy, who is the publisher of the Web site JunkScience.com, points out that adolescent smoking has declined even as onscreen smoking has increased. If movies exert such a mammoth influence on impressionable youngsters, shouldn’t teen tobacco use have risen?

The studies themselves are not as damning as they purport to be. They indicate that kids who watch more movies with smoking are more likely to smoke. But a correlation does not necessarily show a cause: Just because there is lots of beer drinking at baseball games doesn’t mean beer drinking causes baseball.

It may be that kids see a star light up and rush out to imitate him. Or it may be that teens who are inclined to smoke anyway are also inclined to see the sort of movies that feature smoking.

Michael Siegel, a physician and professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, believes the studies greatly exaggerate the impact of tobacco in films. “It is simply one of a large number of ways in which youths are exposed to positive images of smoking [which includes advertisements, television movies, television shows, DVDs, Internet, music videos and a variety of other sources],” he told me in an e-mail interview. “To single out smoking in movies as the cause of youth smoking initiation for a large percentage of kids is ridiculous.”

Putting an R rating on smoky movies probably wouldn’t do much to reduce teenagers’ exposure. Some 75 percent of new releases that feature smoking are rated R — and a lot of them are accessible even to preteens. In one survey of kids in grades 5 through 8, only 16 percent said their parents never let them see R-rated films.

Siegel points out that applying R ratings to films just because they feature full-frontal shots of cigarettes may backfire. Parents anxious about sex and violence may stop paying attention to the rating system once it factors in smoking. So you could end up with more kids seeing films with smoking.

If the MPAA were responding to the clear preferences of parents, this change might be merely dubious. In this case, though, it acted only after getting overt pressure from state governments — which have no more business determining what appears on movie screens than they do in deciding what goes into Judy Blume’s next novel. In the minds of safety zealots, censorship in the name of public health is no vice.

The MPAA’s response validates the politicians in their intrusions and beckons them to find new ways to regulate art and other matters that are supposed to be exempt from their control. A shame it didn’t give the attorneys general a simpler, better response: Snuff this.

The Power of a Lobby…
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Steve Chapman hit the nail on the head when he asked just what business our nation’s attorney generals had in trying to pressure the film industry to alter its standards to their preferences. (“Free expression gets smoked” May 17th)

People wonder how our country could have reached the point where our government is starting to resemble a fanatical fundamentalist religious group in its crusade against smoking.? The answer is simple: money.? The antismoking lobby gets literally hundreds of millions of dollars a year to push for everything from displaying pictures of cancerous lungs on cigarette packs to banning Santa Claus’s pipe in “The Night Before Christmas”.
It uses that money to generate press releases, host conferences, pay for studies, and buy ads designed to skew Americans’ views of what’s important in our world.? Anyone familiar with the current content of television and family movies knows how rarely smoking is portrayed in a good light, yet those behind the Smoke Free Movie movement conjure up visions that would have us believe that beautiful actors and actresses fire up a Marlboro or a Camel with virtually every line they speak.

As an enlightening experiment in the power of what Goebbels called “The Big Lie”, think for a moment about what your perception of smoking being “glamorized” on television was before reading this.? Then settle down for an evening’s TV viewing and count how often you see smoking glamorized on the screen before you.? If you had a good stiff drink every time you saw an example it would probably take you a month to get a good buzz.

Antismoking extremists twist the truth in almost every facet of every campaign they wage, be it smoking in films or smoking bans in bars, and they get away with it because they are perceived as the “good guys in the white hats” standing up valiantly against the evil and insidious demons of Big Tobacco.?

They play that perception to the hilt, and prey upon our love for our children and our concerns for workers and the handicapped, and our fear of cancer and our distrust of big business… and they play us and our emotions like a harp.

Their end goal, the reduction of smoking as part of improving our physical health, may be a good one.? But the means they are using to achieve that goal, deception, coercion, and the undermining of our freedoms, are an evil that we should not be tolerating in a free country.
?
Michael J. McFadden
Author of “Dissecting Antismokers’ Brains”
http://pasan.TheTruthIsALie.com
The author is a member and completely unpaid activist in a number of free-choice groups including a position as Mid-Atlantic Director of The Smoker’s Club, a nonprofit internet-based newsletter group.
Reference on funding in article above:
“Hundreds of millions of dollars” : the AMA Annual Tobacco Report 2001. p.14:?
http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/upload/mm/hod_ibot14_doc.doc?
Actual figure: 883 million dollars in that year just from the state MSA tobacco control grants.

Anti-Smoking Fibs Continue to Entice Journalists

Jacob Sullum | May 16, 2007

In an article about smoking on TV and in the movies, headlined “Images Continue to Entice Kids to Smoke” in the Ventury County Star, Wall Street Journal health writer Tara Parker-Pope unskeptically repeats and even embellishes the claims of anti-smoking activists. “Several studies show that regular exposure to smoking images on television and in movies dramatically increases a child’s risk for trying cigarettes and becoming a smoker,” she writes. What the studies actually show is an association between watching adult-oriented fare (which is more likely to feature tobacco use) and smoking. It’s not clear whether the viewing habits cause the smoking or simply reflect personality and environmental factors that independently make smoking more likely. The question is whether kids who see a lot of R-rated movies are different from those who don’t in ways that affect their attraction to cigarettes.

Parker-Pope also implies that the prevalence of smoking in movies is three times as high as it is in real life:

Of the 50 top-grossing films of 2004 and 2005, 66 percent contained depictions of smoking, with an average frequency of 12.8 incidents per hour, according to research by the American Lung Association chapter in Sacramento. That’s the highest measured incidence in a decade. Notably, the incidence of smoking in the movies is far higher than in real life, where about 21 percent of U.S. adults and about 22 percent of high school students smoke, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But these two numbers, the 66 percent and the 21 percent, are not comparable. If two-thirds of the movies included smoking, that does not mean two-thirds of the characters smoked. A 2005 study published in the journal Chest looked at a larger sample of films and found that “contemporary American movies do not have a higher prevalence of smoking than the general U.S. population.” (The study also found that smoking in the movies was concentrated among poor people and villains.)

Finally, Parker-Pope leaves the impression that cinematic smoking is on the rise. She quotes the dean of the Harvard School of Public Health to that effect, and the Ventury County Star subhead says, “Research Shows Depictions in Movies Are Rising.” Yet the Motion Picture Association of America reports that the share of movies including “even a fleeting glimpse of smoking” dropped from 60 percent to 52 percent between July 2004 and July 2006. Does Parker-Pope have reason to believe the MPAA made those numbers up, or did she leave them out because they undermined the anti-smoking movement’s argument, which she has adopted as her own?

Anti-Smoking Groups Demand Complete Removal of Historically Incorrect Smoking from Non-R Rated Films; An Exercise in Hypocrisy

May 16, 2007
By Michael Siegel
Not content with the MPAA’s historic announcement last week that for the first time, it will consider smoking in films as a factor in the rating of films, a number of anti-smoking groups are calling the MPAA’s policy a mere “placebo” and are demanding that any film with any depiction of smoking be automatically given an R rating, unless the smoking depicted is historically correct (i.e., the person depicted actually smoked in real life).

These health groups issued a strongly worded statement yesterday which declares that: “each time a member of the industry releases another movie that depicts smoking, it does so with the full knowledge of the harm it will bring to children who watch it.”

Describing what happened last week, the statement said: “With much fanfare, the MPAA announces that it will “consider” tobacco imagery in the ratings starting immediately. However, for the goal of eliminating tobacco content in movies accessible to young people, it substitutes another: merely informing parents — the sort of “fig leaf” that Harvard had specifically warned against. Leading health organizations quickly denounce the MPAA’s placebo policy. They pledge to keep pressing for the “R” rating and other measures that can substantially and permanently reduce adolescent exposure. (The statements from the American Medical Association, American Heart Association, American Legacy Foundation, and Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids were typical.) What happened? The major studios that make up the MPAA failed to reach consensus on the recommendations that the MPAA had itself invited. Unable to respond to the substance of the AGs’ letter, it has tried PR razzle-dazzle instead, recycling old and debunked ideas. It is now clear that the studios are not yet willing, for whatever reason, to break themselves free from Hollywood’s history of collaboration with the tobacco industry.”

The groups are now calling on the parent companies of the film studios to force the studios to accept the recommendation of an automatic R-rating for any film that depicts any smoking that is not historically accurate.

The Rest of the Story

I think there are 2 aspects to the hypocrisy being displayed by these health groups.

First, I find it hypocritical to take such a principled stand against any smoking in movies – claiming that any smoking depiction in a movie (even a single, short depiction of someone smoking in the background) represents knowingly causing harm to children watching the film – and then to go ahead and argue that films which depict smoking which is historically accurate, even if the smoking is pervasive and glamorized, are perfectly OK for children to view and there is no need to protect children from exposure to these films by increasing their rating.

If the health groups were simply calling for an end to all depiction of smoking in movies, I would have a lot more respect for the proposal. I just don’t see how you can take such a supposedly principled stand against any depiction of smoking, and then argue that some depiction of smoking is acceptable. It seems to me that once you start drawing a line and casting your own judgment on what smoking depictions are acceptable, then you’ve conceded the argument that there is a responsibility to protect children from any exposure that may increase their propensity to start smoking.

If the health groups’ reasoning is correct, then by depicting historically accurate smoking, are not movie studios depicting smoking with the full knowledge of the harm it will bring to children who watch it?

The second aspect of the hypocrisy of some of these groups – in particular, the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, the American Medical Association, and the American Heart Association – is that at the same time they are supposedly standing up against the tobacco industry and demanding that Hollywood end its historical collaboration with Big Tobacco, they are teaming up with the largest tobacco company – Philip Morris – and promoting legislation that is the chief legislative priority of this cigarette company.

I’m sorry, but if you are going to march shoulder-to-shoulder with Philip Morris through the halls of Congress, jointly promoting a piece of legislation that was negotiated directly with Philip Morris and which contains provisions inserted specifically to protect Big Tobacco profits, then you have lost the pedestal upon which you can proclaim to Hollywood that it needs to end its own collaboration with the tobacco companies.

To make matters worse, I think the implication that by depicting smoking in movies, the studios are continuing their collaboration with the tobacco industry is false. There is no evidence I am aware of that in 2007, the depiction of smoking in movies represents a collaboration with the tobacco industry, or that the tobacco companies are in any way influencing the depiction of smoking in movies. I understand that historically, this was the case. But the statement implies that the collaboration continues and that the influence of the industry is the reason why films are depicting smoking today. If you are going to make such a claim, I think it is your obligation to back it up. I am not aware of any such documentation, however.

Perhaps most importantly, I find this stand by the health groups to be quite narrow-minded and inconsistent from a broader public health perspective. There are a lot of ways in which movies influence unhealthy behaviors among adolescents: depiction of drunk driving, fast driving, alcohol misuse, illicit drug use, violence, sex, sexual violence, racism, gang violence, firearms, and so forth. For any of these depictions, one could state just as accurately that they are done with with the full knowledge of the harm it will bring to children who watch them.

Why, then, are these health groups not calling for an R-rating for any film that depicts any of these other behaviors. If anything, many of these behaviors could be considered worse, because unlike smoking, many of them are illegal. If we are going to have a zero-tolerance policy for smoking in movies, should we not also have a zero-tolerance policy for these other exposures which cause great harm to our nation’s children?

Again, I could respect the health groups’ position a lot more if they were taking a broad public health perspective and calling for an overhaul of the ratings system such that we protect our children from exposure to the wide range of depictions that may lead them to adopt unhealthy or harmful behaviors. To single out smoking and treat it differently seems narrow-minded to me.

If a single depiction of smoking in a film warrants an R-rating, then certainly we would want to give an R rating to a film that depicts racism, would we not? Or violence against women?

While I am obviously an anti-smoking advocate, I more than anything consider myself to be a public health practitioner. I try to see the world with a wider lens than merely a filter for smoking depictions. There is a whole world of unhealthy influences of media out there. It seems we are missing much of it because the smoke has gotten in our eyes.