Research: Hollywood movies linked to Youth smoking

ASH NZ Press release
** EMBARGOED TO 0100 GMT, 8 MAY 2007

New research: Hollywood movies linked to Youth smoking
U.S. films a vector for global tobacco epidemic?

MAY 8 — Three studies involving nearly 15,000 adolescents in the United States, Germany and Mexico all report that teens who see more smoking in films, usually U.S.-made movies, are more likely to start smoking in reality. This has implications for NZ teenagers too.

Reports show that US films bring in 30 percent of movie box office sales globally. Most of the movies NZ teens watch are Hollywood box office hits.

“NZ has gained a lot by halting traditional tobacco advertising, but it’s also necessary to dramatically cut kids’ exposure to the toxic tobacco content in movies. Policies to curtail or ban tobacco industry advertising and promotion could be undermined by the many films with smoking that continue to reach youth,” says ASH spokesperson Sneha Paul.

The recent studies highlight the need for the NZ rating body (Film and video labeling body reporting to the Department of Internal Affairs) to give future films that promote tobacco use an adult rating.

“Why should New Zealanders suffer for the decisions made by rich production firms in the USA? Our teenagers must know the truth – tobacco kills.”

The three studies:

• A report in today’s Pediatrics confirms that U.S. films deliver billions of tobacco impressions to U.S. teens 10-14, the ages most likely to begin experimenting with cigarettes. This helps to explain previous findings that movie smoking recruits up to half of all new young smokers in the U.S. every year.

• The study in Germany, published today in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, tested whether teens in a society where tobacco advertising is still rampant are as influenced by smoking on-screen. After controlling for demographic, media and psychosocial factors, investigators found that teens who had seen the most smoking in films (mostly U.S. blockbusters) were more than twice as likely to have tried smoking than those who saw the least amount—results that mirror findings in the U.S.

• The study in Mexico, unpublished but discussed at recent conferences, also found that, after controlling for all other factors known to influence whether teens start to smoke, exposure to on-screen smoking is strongly correlated with teens taking up cigarettes. So far, Germany and Mexico are the largest export markets for U.S. films to replicate U.S. cross-sectional studies of movie smoking and teen smoking.

These new reports come six weeks after the Harvard School of Public Health, invited by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to make recommendations on the tobacco question, advised the U.S. film industry to “eliminate the depiction of tobacco smoking from films accessible to children and youths.” The MPAA, which represents the major studios, has yet to respond publicly.

Researchers have looked at films’ impact on adolescent smoking ever since U.S. lawsuits uncovered tobacco company memos describing multi-million dollar, multi-decade efforts to place tobacco product in films. These programs often involved offshore tobacco subsidiaries of U.S. tobacco companies. A 2006 paper reviewing more than three dozen related studies (http://repositories.cdlib.org/postprints/1127/) concluded:

"A policy change to assign an R rating [no admission under 17 without parent] to movie smoking, together with other policy changes to mitigate the impact of smoking in movies, would reduce almost immediately adolescent exposure to smoking and subsequent initiation by approximately 60%, preventing approximately 200,000 [U.S.] adolescents from starting to smoke each year and avoiding approximately 62,000 premature [U.S.] deaths. "

Three-quarters of all live-action films produced in the U.S. between 1999 and 2006 featured tobacco use, including 36 percent of G and PG (general audience) films, 75 percent of PG-13 (parental guidance suggested under 13), and 88 percent of R-rated films. In the U.S., G, PG and PG-13 films deliver some 60 percent of teens’ exposure to tobacco imagery. U.S. movies earn half their revenue outside the “domestic” U.S. and Canada market.

Up-rating tobacco to an age classification that limits theatrical attendance by teens need not mean that more films will be off-limits to adolescents in future. On average, R-rated films in the U.S. garner half the box office of lower rated films. Up-rating tobacco in both national and imported films, countries with robust rating systems can expect producers at home and in the U.S. to start keeping tobacco out of films that would otherwise qualify for more general ratings.

According to the World Health Organization, tobacco is projected to kill one billion people this century—ten times more than in the 20th Century—if present trends continue, including 250 million of the world’s children alive today. By 2025, 70 percent of tobacco deaths are expected to occur in developing countries.

ENDS

© Scoop Media