http://www.venturacountystar.com/vcs/county_news/article/0,1375,VCS_226_3714465,00.html

Movies promote use of tobacco, he argues

By Kevin Clerici, kclerici@VenturaCountyStar.com
April 20, 2005

Anti-smoking crusader Stan Glantz made a name for himself when his research helped trigger California's landmark smoke-free workplace laws.

Now, the professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and author of "Tobacco Wars" has his sights set on the movie industry. Today's flicks are the smokiest since 1950, he says, and the rampant images of stars smoking are stimulating young people to puff, too.

On Tuesday, Glantz came to Ventura County to accuse Hollywood of shepherding some 390,000 young people a year to the tobacco industry and to lay out his four-step solution to snuffing out smoking in movies aimed at young people.

"The tobacco industry has paid off Hollywood to get smoking into movies for decades," Glantz told about 40 people gathered at the Cowan Conference Center in Camarillo for a talk sponsored by the Ventura County Tobacco Education and Prevention Coalition. A similar session was scheduled for later in the day in Oxnard.

Known for his strong stands on a range of tobacco-control issues, Glantz contends there is growing scientific evidence that smoking in movies is a more powerful promoter of the habit than traditional cigarette advertising.

Movie industry leaders have countered that curbing smoking could hamper directors' freedom of artistic expression. It also would open the floodgates for censoring other scenes in movies, such as drinking, drug use or even overeating, they say.

But Glantz rejects claims that smoking on the silver screen reflects real life.

Since 1950, the percentage of Americans who smoke has been cut in half, yet smoking in the movies has dramatically increased and recently shifted into films geared toward youth, particularly those rated PG-13, Glantz claims.

A 2003 study of 600 popular films showed smoking was portrayed in 85 percent of them, including about half of all G-rated films, he said.

Further, a Dartmouth Medical School study estimated that 390,000 kids start smoking each year because of film imagery.

Glantz said smoking in movies can actually counter good role modeling by nonsmoking parents. "The more smoking kids see, the more likely they are to start lighting up," he said.

Glantz, a recipient of the American Public Health Association's lifetime achievement award for his research and advocacy work, made waves when he spoke before a U.S. Senate committee last May, calling on the movie industry to voluntarily change its practices on movies marketed to kids.

The Motion Picture Association of America, he said, could make a significant dent in the problem by altering its rating system so that all new films containing smoking would be rated R, restricting the audience to those 17 and older unless accompanied by a parent.

Motion Picture Association officials did not return phone calls Tuesday.

Exceptions could be made for films that reflect the dangers and consequences of smoking, or for movies using smoking to accurately represent a historical figure, Glantz said.

Glantz also wants studios to certify in the closing credits that there were no payments by the tobacco industry for product placement, to eliminate all brand identification in films, and to run free anti-smoking ads before any films that contain smoking.

The movie rating system, created in response to concerns over foul language and other content in the late 1960s, does not consider smoking when handing out a rating, because tobacco use is legal for adults.

But Glantz said the "F-word" is legal, too, and any film containing more than one usage of it, or a movie that uses it to describe a sexual encounter, generally requires an R rating.

"All we are asking the studios," he said, "is to treat smoking as seriously as they treat the F-word."

On the Net:

http://www.smokefreemovies.ucsf.edu