Movies That Blow Smoke

Do

movies aimed at kids glamorize smoking? The American Medical Association (AMA) Alliance, the 26,000-member volunteer arm of the AMA, thinks so. And while everybody else is busy compiling Ten Best Lists for 2006, this socially responsible Grinch has been busy figuring out what's worst. For the holiday season, it has released a blacklist of no-nos for parents to consider as they are loading up stockings with DVDs. The following recent films, according to the AMA Alliance, contain an excessive amount of smoking:

* The Ant Bully (PG: Time Warner, animated)
* Material Girls (PG: Sony)
* Talladega Nights (PG-13: Sony)
* Pirates of the Caribbean 2 (PG-13: Disney)
* Stay Alive (PG-13: Disney)
* Superman Returns (PG-13: Time Warner)
* You, Me and Dupree (PG-13: General Electric, Universal)

Although the U.S. domestic tobacco industry has agreed to stop paid cigarette brand placements, activists want Hollywood to incorporate smoking as a part of its voluntary ratings system, which now judges movies according to sex, violence and foul language. According to the Centers for Disease Control, smoking among teenagers is no longer dropping as it did during the late 1990s, and smoking in films is partly responsible. "Movies deliver billions of glamorized pro-smoking messages to adolescents in this country," says James Sargent, M.D., a Dartmouth Medical School professor who researches the impact on children of movies with smoking scenes.

Over the past seven years, Hollywood's youth-rated movies have been more likely to feature tobacco than R-rated films: there have been at least 460 G, PG and PG-13 movies with smoking, compared with only 440 R-rated movies, according to the Alliance. At the same time, tobacco advertising and promotion in the United States has more than tripled since 1997.

"On-screen smoking has been implicated as the cause of 390,000 new teen smokers every year," says Nita Maddox, AMA Alliance president. "It is estimated that 120,000 of this group of new teen smokers will eventually die from tobacco use." The Alliance is launching a parent-to-parent grassroots campaign to make future movies rated G, PG and PG-13 smoke-free — an effort that could reverberate in other foreign countries where U.S films dominate and where, Maddox says, "the tobacco industry is hunting its next generation."

Meanwhile, tobacco companies are on the defensive. Last month, Philip Morris USA, whose products are reported to account for 71% of the brands featured in movies since 1990, launched an advertising campaign asking entertainment industry officials to voluntarily eliminate its products in all movies and television shows "You have the power to help prevent youth smoking — just by losing one little prop," says one of the ads. Jennifer Hunter, a Philip Morris USA vice president, said in announcing the campaign: "Movies have the power to amuse, delight, teach and inspire. However, some studies suggest they may also influence a child's decision to smoke."

But Stanton Glantz, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine and founder of the Smoke-free Movies Action Network (smokefreemovies.ucsf.edu) calls the ads, which appeared in Daily Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, "preposterous." No tobacco company, he notes, has asked for a ban in movies rated PG or PG-13 movies, which teenagers favor. Meanwhile, a mandatory R rating for movies that feature smoking has been endorsed by the World Health Organization and the American Medical Association among other groups. And earlier this year, 41 state attorneys general again wrote motion picture studios renewing their call for anti-smoking ads on any DVD or movie that includes smoking.