HOLLYWOOD MOVIES HAVE NOW BECOME THE MOST POWERFUL RECRUITER OF NEW SMOKERS. AND THE #1 HEALTH THREAT TO YOUNG PEOPLE IN AMERICA TODAY.

What’s wrong with smoking in movies?

Forty years after the U.S. Surgeon General first concluded that smoking causes lung cancer, tobacco companies still sell over twenty billion packs of cigarettes a year in the U.S.1 Tobacco kills 453,000 Americans annually — 400,000 from smoking, 53,000 from secondhand smoke.2 Heart disease, emphysema (loss of breathing capacity) and cancer from smoking make tobacco the leading cause of preventable death in the U.S. today.

With all the toxic ingredients in cigarette smoke, it’s almost like sucking on a car’s exhaust pipe. So how do tobacco companies get hundreds of thousands of Americans, 90% of them under age eighteen,3 to start smoking every year?
Well, it’s not hard to sell an addictive drug once customers are hooked. Getting people to light up the first few times is the big hurdle. And researchers have found out that most young people try tobacco because they see it in the movies — a lot.

In the past five years, almost three-quarters of movies rated G, PG and PG-13 included smoking.4 And studies show that movies recruit more new young smokers than all tobacco advertising.

The good news? If tobacco were left out of movies rated for kids, the effect of smoking in movies on kids would be cut in half. It all comes down to the seven major Hollywood studios and their choice to “greenlight” smoking in movies they want kids to see.

Educating audiences and convincing the studios to stop smoking in youth-rated films is what this handbook is all about.

Download Where There's Smoke: Hollywood & Tobacco

Pdf format, 996kb, 87pages.

The New York State Department of Health Tobacco Control Program (NYS DOH TCP) prepared this guide with funding support from the American Legacy Foundation and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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