Activists want smoking in PG-13 films stopped

Tobacco companies once paid movie moguls to feature shots of stars smoking in films. But a 1998 legal agreement between states and the tobacco companies banned that practice, which critics say helped sell smoking to kids.

Now a research letter published in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that many blockbuster PG-13 movies – popular among kids – still feature scenes of stars who smoke, and of cigarette packs with clearly identifiable logos.

Previous studies by the same team show that kids who watch popular movies with smoking scenes are more likely to start smoking, a habit that can lead, many years later, to cancer, heart disease and other disorders, says lead researcher Anna Adachi-Mejia of the Dartmouth Medical School.

Once kids start smoking, they’re easily addicted, she adds.

Adachi-Mejia and her colleagues looked at 400 movies released before the 1998 ban and 400 that came out afterward.

They found that the number of tobacco-brand appearances in R-rated movies had declined substantially, from 29.8 percent to 13.3 percent.

But when the team looked only at movies with a rating of PG-13, they found only a slight decline, from 15 percent to 11.8 percent. Adachi-Mejia says that isn’t “a statistically significant difference.”

But John Feehery, an executive vice president for the Motion Picture Association of America, calls the decline “pretty significant.” In many cases, he adds, the director casts smoking in a negative light.

The practice of featuring brand-name tobacco products in movies has got to stop, says Stanton Glantz, an anti-smoking activist at the University of California, San Francisco.

“The more kids see smoking in the movies, the more likely they are to smoke,” Glantz says.