Health advocates: Hollywood smoking affects teens in every corner of the world
Published on August 17, 2009 3:40 AM
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Members of non-governmental organization Action on Smoking and Health (nicknamed as ASH), representing anti-smoking advocates across the United Kingdom urge the government to prohibit smoking scenes in films.
Box office Hollywood movies where actors light up have a great impact on adolescents in many countries, according to ASH chairman.
In addition, movies filmed by Latin-American and European film studios also have influenced on teenagers’ choices.
Survey of American and European teenagers demonstrated that smoking scenes had a direct relation to taking up smoking in adolescence, declared ASH.
The health group is concerned that the issue has a similar impact both in developing and developed countries and asked the movie industry to remove smoking scenes from the films.
Altria, owner of Marlboro-maker Philip Morris recently called Hollywood studios to avoid using its cigarettes in the movies.
Nevertheless, ASH asked the tobacco industry to follow Altria steps and avoid product placement in movies.
Moreover, the organization wants to demonstrate severe anti-smoking advertisements before any movie, showing smoking scenes, and asks to rate the films with smoking scenes as R-rated (only for adults).
However, the critics argued that it is up to the film industry to decide whether to show a legal product in the films or not, especially such product is used by almost 20 percent of all people in the world.
Recent US study, found out that the film industry has showed almost 14 billion smoking scenes to teenagers aged 12-17.
Another study accomplished by German researchers and published in the latest issue of American Journal of Clinical Medicine, stated that adolescents who had been exposed to smoking scenes in movies were twice more likely to light up at least once than those who hadn’t seen smoking by their favorite actors.
Survey in Latin America demonstrated similar results.
Lisa Myers-Peters of the Tobacco-free Kids, an agency advocating for smoke-free movies declared that smoking scenes in the films have been a very complicated issue for public health, because according to the numerous researches and reports showing smoking in movies lures minors to taking up cigarettes.
She also said that movie industry and especially Hollywood has been responsible for thousands underage smokers.
But the chairman of Freedom Organization for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco (nicknamed as FOREST), Simon Clark argued that there has been not enough reliable data to claim that minors were affected by seeing smoking scenes in the movies.
He said that the majority of the movies show real life, and smoking is an essential part of this life since millions of people are lighting up worldwide.
He named ASH efforts to crack down smoking scenes as a ridiculous censorship.
He also said that an outright ban on smoking scenes in the movies could have a converse affect as teenagers could be attracted by the forbidenness of cigarettes.
