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Highlands Today

Health Hazard

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Donna Noel Stayton

Published: February 18, 2008

Contrary to a much–publicized announcement last May, Hollywood's rating system fails to warn parents that most movies feature smoking.

Young audiences around the world are still being bombarded with billions of tobacco impressions every time an actor lights up or a tobacco brand is shown. This isn't a matter of personal taste or censorship. It's a major public health challenge. The tobacco industry rakes in $4 billion in lifetime sales through Hollywood movies that recruit kids to smoke every year.

Since the major studios still won't take action, this community must. As a first step, this newspaper can start including tobacco content in its movie listings. After all, smoking is the only movie content proven to physically harm the audience.

Second, the rest of us can write the studios' parent companies – Disney, General Electric, News Corp., Time Warner, and Viacom – and tell them to stop recruiting 390,000 new teen smokers a year for the tobacco industry. Urge that all future movies with smoking be rated "R."

Today, kids and their parents in more than a dozen countries around the world will be protesting America's most toxic export – Hollywood blockbuster movies with tobacco imagery that arrive on screens without warning. Tobacco will kill five million people this year around the world. That number is expected to double unless tobacco promotion is halted. That includes tobacco product placement in the movies we love.

Donna Noel Stayton
Tobacco Prevention Specialist
Highlands County Health Department

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