I’m not one of these anti-smoking nazis. I think smoking is a severely dumb ass thing to do to yourself, but hey, that’s your business. As long as you don’t do it around me, I’ve got no problem with it. I’ve also been against this whole crusade to get smoking out of movies. To me that’s just ridiculous. Movies in part reflect the world we live in. If people smoke in the world we live in, then it’s dishonest and a twisting of reality to purposefully eliminate that from films.
However, if it can be shown that smoking in movies is actually having a negative effect on teenagers… should that issue be revisited? Well, one study is now suggesting there is a link to smoking in movies and smoking in teenagers. The folks over at M&C give us this:
The researchers coded displays of smoking in 532 hit movies in the five years prior to the survey, then asked the teens if they had seen a random selection of 50 of these movies. Follow-up interviews to assess smoking status were done after eight months, 16 months and two years.
At the beginning of the study, 5,637, or 90 percent, of the teens had never smoked, while 33 had smoked more than 100 cigarettes. By the 2-year follow-up survey, 125 of the participants had become established smokers. The study, published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, found adolescents who were below the midpoint of movie smoking exposure were less likely than teens who were above the midpoint to have smoked more than 100 cigarettes.
The study was conducted at The Dartmouth Medical School in Lebanon, N.H.
So the question once again is… if (and that’s a huge if) it can be scientifically shown that smoking in the movies does cause higher rates of teenagers to start smoking… should we be willing to consider phasing smoking out of movies today?
