Health & Fitness: Anti-smoking effort aims to stop 'glamorous' smoking on Hollywood's big screen Health & Fitness: Anti-smoking effort aims to stop 'glamorous' smoking on Hollywood's big screen (September 14, 2005)

By Katie Bearman

Special to the Almanac

Hollywood stars who are tired of fan mail may soon find themselves thinking nostalgically about letters from dazzled aficionados.

Celebrities such as actor Chris Rock and director Ron Howard should by now have received boxes containing hundreds of flattened cigarette cartons, courtesy of Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, says Dr. Seth Ammerman of the Stanford Medical School. The hospital sent similar packages to heads of studios including Disney and Time Warner.

As part of a community outreach and advocacy program required in their training, pediatric residents at the hospital collected and flattened more than 900 cigarette boxes recently in an attempt to quell the promotion of smoking that is rampant in many Hollywood films, Dr. Ammerman said.

They sought out both hospital employees and community members to sign or write letters on the cartons, demanding that Hollywood implement policies to prevent more youth from seeing their favorite actors smoke in movies.

The reason? As blockbusters light up the big screens, more and more adolescents are lighting up cigarettes.

"Smoking is portrayed glamorously in movies, and teens look up to actors," Dr. Ammerman says.

According to a study released in 2001 by the Dartmouth School of Medicine, many actors smoke in popular films, and the more occurrences of smoking that young people see in films, the more likely they are to try a cigarette.

Published in the British Journal of Medicine, the study surveyed 4,919 children ages 9 to 15. Of the kids who had seen zero to 50 instances of smoking in films, 4.9 percent had tried smoking. On the other hand, among those who had seen more than 150 instances of smoking, 31.3 percent had tried smoking themselves, according to the research team led by Dr. James Sargent of the Dartmouth School of Medicine.

The study controlled for age; gender; school performance; school; parents' education; smoking by friend, sibling, or parent; and receptivity to tobacco promotions.

"Each year, close to 400,000 youths ages 11 to 17 start smoking, and half of them say that smoking portrayed in movies is a major influence in their starting to smoke," Dr. Ammerman says.

About 400,000 adults die each year from tobacco-related causes; thus, the tobacco industry needs to keep replacing the smoking population, he adds.

"So the tobacco industry is in bed with Hollywood. It is opposed to campaigns that push to remove smoking from movies," Dr. Ammerman maintains.

One such campaign is Smoke Free Movies, launched in 2001 by Dr. Stanton Glantz of the UC San Francisco Medical School.

The movement is pushing Hollywood to implement four key policies: give any film that contains smoking an "R" rating, unless it clearly shows the negative consequences of tobacco use; prove in closing credits that none of the production staff received any money or other compensation for using tobacco in the film; show anti-smoking ads before any movie that shows tobacco use, no matter what the movie is rated; and eliminate tobacco brand identification and imagery from all movies.

"Just adopting the 'R' rating alone would reduce the number of teens who start smoking by 60 percent," Dr. Ammerman says. "If you add in the other three policy changes, the reduction would be even more pronounced."

Dr. Lisa Chamberlain of the Stanford Medical School says that while the pediatric residents' project was not an official part of Smoke Free Movies, it aimed to inform the public about the campaign and help Smoke Free Movies achieve its objectives.

"The main goals of the pediatric residents' project were to raise awareness in our community about this problem and make voices from the Peninsula heard in Hollywood," Dr. Chamberlain says. "It is in the best interest of kids that Hollywood takes into account children's and adolescents' health, but they're not considering this perspective when it comes to smoking in films."

Dr. Chamberlain says she and Dr. Ammerman devised the idea to send the cigarette cartons to figures in Hollywood because "we wanted to do something different than sending letters -- something that would represent the problem. Actors and directors are busy people, so we needed to catch their eye."

But Hollywood can be hard to sway.

"The typical mode of response of Hollywood is to pretend it never happened," Dr. Ammerman says.

Still, Dr. Chamberlain says, Lucile Packard's project effectively educated the public, and Dania Lindenberg, a pediatric resident, says she thinks it helped educate parents about the different influences on teen smoking.

Some of the residents spoke to students at Alta Vista High School in Mountain View, about half of whom smoke, and they were much more receptive to the information than the residents thought they would be, Ms. Lindenberg says.

"They asked a lot of questions, and they didn't boo us like some of us expected them to," she adds.

And Dr. Ammerman says he is hopeful about Hollywood's eventual course of action.

"The policies of the Smoke Free Movie campaign are becoming mainstream," he says. "I think Hollywood will eventually adopt all four, with continued grassroots pressure on Hollywood to do the right thing."

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