Study: Smoking in movies encourages teens to take up cigarettes

London-AP -- A new study suggests teens who watch actors smoke in movies are three times more likely to light up than their peers who watch less on-screen smoking.

Many studies have linked smoking on the big screen with increased adolescent smoking, but this is the first to assess children before they take up the habit and track them over time.

Some experts say the study provides the strongest evidence to date that smoking depicted in movies encourages adolescents to start smoking. Others remain unconvinced.

The Motion Picture Association of America, which rates movies and represents the movie industry, had no immediate comment.

The study was funded by the U-S National Cancer Institute, and was published today on the Web site of The Lancet medical journal.

Oh, this is rich. Somebody remind me sometime to trot out the list of 250-some *benefits* smoking has (increased alertness, enhances short term memory, aids digestion, for starters) sometime.

If movies "encourage" people to do things, certainly we should only produce...90 minute reels of white snow? No, wait, that would encourage kids to do cocaine. Black screen? Might affect their fashion habits and depress them, although we could pump them full of Prozac -- oh, wait, we already *do* pump them full of Prozac (and let's not forget Ritalin).

Besides, everybody knows that you start smoking to look *cool*. Now, I may have *practiced* the manner in which Bogart and Dean smoked their cigarettes, in order to look cooler, but that was active research, not Tyler Durden sending secret messages to my alter ego.

Right. Zee Safety Nazis, zey know vat is good for you. There will be no shouting, no spitting, no talking, no movies, no television, no driving without a seatbelt, no Internet, and absolutely no laughter. Vee haff vays uff finding out if you're enjoying your life, and vee *vill* stop you.

(as for the Cancer institute's "study", anybody who knows how the funding shell game goes in DC knows the results were arrived at BEFORE the study was conducted...you don't get funding for telling people that smoking "might not be *that* bad")

Oh, how I loathe the Safety Nazis.

To end, on a serious note, the smoking issue is getting absurd. Someone has to shake the pols up and mobilize the smoker vote (it's plenty large enough to make a difference); toss out one on the smoking ban issue; then the rest will know that this is an issue they *can* lose on (whether or not they will is irrelevant; they'll be plenty scared).

People deriding the smokers now have absolutely *no* right to come whining to us when the Safety Nazis finally touch upon something *they* enjoy (liquor? liquor, anybody?). Same reason I fervently defend the 2nd amendment but don't have a firearm, or plan on buying one.

Ask not for whom the Safety Nazis tax & prohibit -- they tax & prohibit for you.

Well at least it was conducted by an unbiased party.

Actually not. NCI is one of the most anti-smoker groups of the anti-smoker groups. And they didn't conduct the study, they just paid for the studay. Stanton Glantz, the darling of the anti-industry, conducted this study - it is one of his pet projects to remove all reference to smoking or depictions of such from every film shown or if not to at least have them rated "R" to the kiddies are not influenced by the big bad tobacco companies.

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