April 2007 | Back to Table of Contents

MMAA Update

Removing Hollywood's Smoke Screen

By Conrad Schiebel

Let's get smoking out of movies for kids.

If you’ve recently sat down to watch a movie or television program with your children, you may have noticed a lot of cigarette smoking. But children I have spoken to don’t even seem to notice the prevalence of actors smoking on the small or big screen. Perhaps kids have become desensitized to seeing it. Its presence is no accident.

Tobacco companies are feeling the pinch of huge damage settlements and restrictions on their ability to advertise their products. Still, they have a product to sell. And what better way to send their message to the next generation of smokers than through television and the movies?

Big Tobacco has made Hollywood its biggest recruiter. A significant percentage of movies and television programs are aimed at young people, making this medium the perfect advertising vehicle for reaching children and youths. You may be surprised to know that that icon of American family values, the Disney Corporation, is the studio with the highest percentage of films that include scenes showing people smoking. In fact, 83 percent of its PG-13 movies released during the past seven years included scenes with characters smoking.

Stan Glanz, M.D., a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, has founded Smoke-Free Movies, a campaign to reduce the value of movies as recruitment tools for smoking. He estimates that 390,000 kids in the United States begin smoking each year as a result of Hollywood’s influence. This number is nearly enough to replace the number of smokers who die in this country each year. At least half of the kids who start smoking will continue for the next 15 to 20 years, according to the World Health Organization. This should be a huge concern for those of us in the medical community because smoking remains the leading cause of preventable death, killing one in five people in the United States annually. Big Tobacco’s influential media blitz seems to be working: Seventy percent of kids try smoking, and one in three becomes a regular smoker by age 18.

In order to help combat this disturbing trend, the New York Department of Health and the University of California, San Francisco, have developed a program called Screen Out!, the goal of which is to remove smoking from films that are marketed to kids. Also joining the campaign are the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Heart Association. The American Legacy Foundation, which distributes tobacco settlement money, is providing financial backing. More recently, the AMA Alliance has been asked to rally members to action. Alliance members will bring the Screen Out! message into their communities in order to stimulate a grassroots movement to let the Hollywood studios know our concerns about their portrayal of tobacco use. If media companies are going to change their ways, they need to hear from parents.

Screen Out! has four basic goals:
1. To rate movies that feature smoking “R”;
2. To require producers to certify on screen that no one involved in a movie’s production received anything of value in consideration for using or displaying tobacco in a film;
3. To require theaters to show strong, anti-smoking ads before any movie that shows tobacco use, regardless of its rating; and
4. To stop identifying tobacco brands in movies.

The organizers of the campaign plan to accomplish these goals by producing an educational guide for parents; encouraging consumers to boycott movies marketed to youths and children that contain scenes with smoking; encouraging individuals to petition media corporations to stop using tobacco products in their shows and films; getting civic organizations, school boards, student-parent-teacher organizations, and other groups to sign on to the campaign; and working with movie theaters to spread the anti-smoking message.

The AMA Alliance’s official roll-out of the Screen Out! program took place in February. Please look for and support activities in your area. If you are interested in learning more about this campaign or would like to get involved, please contact Vicki Westling, vwestling@mnmed.org or 612/362-3764. You can download the Screen Out! guide for parents as well as other anti-smoking materials from the AMA Alliance Web site (www.amaalliance.org).

It’s time to cut through the smoke and take action. MM

Conrad Schiebel is president of the Minnesota Medical Association Alliance.