Pediatricians Warn that Childrens' Movies Contain Too Many Smoking Scenes [03/19-5]

Excerpts from: Smoke screens
Stanford pediatric residents warn that cinematic cigarettes endanger kids

By Christopher Heredia San Francisco Chronicle [03/19/04]

Watching G- and PG-rated movies may be hazardous to your child's health.

That's the message from aspiring pediatricians at Stanford University, who are warning that movies aimed at children contain far too many scenes of people smoking, which they say inspires kids to take up the deadly habit.

The 19 pediatric medicine students at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital point to a recent UC San Francisco study that found that nearly 80 percent of the 776 movies produced during the last five years included tobacco use. A more alarming finding, the researchers said, was that 80 percent of PG-13 rated films had smoking in them -- and so did half the ones rated G or PG.

So the students are gathering empty cigarette cartons and signatures to deliver to movie executives in June. Their message: Drop images of tobacco and smoking from the big screen, unless the movies are rated R.

Heightening their concern is a similar study completed last June by Dartmouth Medical School, which showed a correlation between tobacco use in movies and a rise in teen smoking. In that study, kids who saw movies that depicted smoking were three times as likely to start smoking as their peers. Dartmouth researchers estimated that smoking in movies causes 360,000 teens each year to smoke their first cigarette.

So far, the Stanford pediatric medicine residents have approached other physicians on the Peninsula and plan to approach community groups, government agencies and schools for support. Ireland said they hope to gather at least 1, 000 signed empty cigarette cartons and signatures by June to send to the studio execs.

Ireland said her class is doing the advocacy project because it is a course requirement, but also because she and many of her peers are concerned about teen smoking after seeing children suffering from the effects of second- hand smoke.

Federal health studies show that tobacco use among teens has been declining since the mid-1990s. The 2003 Monitoring the Future Survey reported that fewer eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders are using tobacco -- the rate of smoking has dropped by about 50 percent among younger teens. But researchers expressed concern because about one-fourth of teens leaving high school have a smoking habit.

"I was pretty shocked at the (UCSF study) numbers," Ireland said. "All of us realized there was some smoking in movies, but not how substantial it was and how crafty the tobacco companies and Hollywood have become about getting smoking and images of cigarettes into movies.

The three big studios that depicted tobacco use the most were Time Warner, Disney and Sony, which the authors said represented 56 percent of tobacco images in movies made since 1999. Time Warner's studios were slammed for producing the largest number of movies with smoking depicted in them -- 25 percent. Of the company's movies with smoking, 42 percent were youth-rated.

There's already strong epidemiological evidence showing that smoking in movies gets kids to smoke, and the more they see, the more they smoke," said Stanton Glantz, author of the UCSF study.

Glantz pointed out that movies popular with young people such as "Men in Black" and "Elf" showed people or animated worms smoking specific brands of cigarettes, sometimes disobeying no-smoking signs to do so. The report rapped Disney's "101 Dalmatians," which showed the evil character Cruella De Vil chain-smoking cigarettes.

If movies like those were rated R, Glantz said, it would cut teen exposure to smoking in movies by 60 percent.

Click here to view this study from UC-San Francisco

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