On May 11, the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee held a hearing to examine the effects of smoking in the movies on children. Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) presided over the hearing, saying, “The link between movie characters smoking and young children being influenced by that behavior is unquestionable.” Noting that deaths from tobacco use is one of the greatest public health threats in America, Sen. Ensign added, “We have a great social responsibility to do everything we can to stop kids from smoking.” He called upon the movie industry to end “gratuitous smoking in the movies,” stating, “This Senator is not someone who wants to see the First Amendment abridged…I don’t want to call for censorship…However, I do believe that there are some things that Hollywood can do to be more responsible.”
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) expressed his frustration with the lack of enforcement of the Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) and its terms. “Every single time government closes a window that signals marketing to kids, the tobacco industry finds a way to skirt it,” he said. Adding that the MSA has “more holes than a piece of cheese,” Sen. Wyden stated, “What troubles me is that there are no consequences, none, if they [the tobacco companies] go ahead and do it [advertise to children].”
Dr. Madeline Dalton of Dartmouth Medical School presented findings from a nine-year-long study examining the influence of behavioral and social risk factors for adolescent smoking. Saying that the “period of greatest risk for smoking initiation is during childhood, particularly between 10 and 15 years of age,” Dr. Dalton added, “If we can prevent children from smoking until they reach their 18th birthday, then their chance of becoming an addicted smoker is very low.”
The Dartmouth study examined 600 top box office hits over the past decade; 85 percent of those movies portrayed smoking, and R-rated movies were more likely to portray smoking than G-rated movies. “Adolescents who saw the most amount of smoking in movies were much more likely to initiate smoking themselves,” Dr. Dalton said. “Seventeen percent of those who had the highest exposure to smoking in the movies had initiated smoking, compared to only 3% of those who had the lowest exposure.” Noting that there are a number of other factors that can contribute to adolescent smoking such as peer and family smoking, personality characteristics, and parenting characteristics, Dr. Dalton told the committee, “Even after taking all of these factors into account, we found that adolescents who viewed the most smoking in movies were still 2.7…times more likely to try smoking compared to those who viewed the least amount of smoking in movies…Overall, even after controlling for all of the other factors, we found that half…the adolescents who initiated smoking in this study did so because of viewing smoking in movies.”
Jack Valenti of the Motion Picture Association of America opened his testimony by saying, “I oppose smoking on the screen. But I am not a movie maker.” Mr. Valenti continued, noting that “if smoking by some actors is essential to the time and place of the story, and is indispensable to quickly identify the actor’s demeanor and character to advance the narrative, no one ought to intervene in a director’s design for telling his story the way he chooses to tell it.” Acknowledging the Dartmouth study, he said, “Filmmakers should be aware of any and all information that suggests that smoking in the movies may be linked to influencing young people to begin smoking,” and told the committee that the industry is “fully cooperating with the creative guilds to educate and sensitize their members and our executives about this issue.”
Addressing the 1998 MSA, Attorney General of Maryland Joseph Curran said that under the agreement, tobacco companies are required to pay $25 billion over 25 years to 46 states. “Equally important, tobacco companies are required to forever change the way that they advertise and market their products, never again targeting our youth or making tobacco brand names ubiquitous through apparel or other merchandise, billboard and bus ads, sponsorships or, of particular concern here today, product placement in the media, including the movies,” he said. “In spite of these express prohibitions, smoking in the movies—particularly in youth rated movies—remains as prevalent today as it was before the MSA—and by some measures has increased.”
Mr. Curran stated that the MSA “is not self-enforcing and requires constant vigilance” and detailed the National Association of Attorneys General’s efforts to enforce the MSA. In particular, a number of Attorneys General have met with various representatives of the movie industry to discuss the depiction of smoking in the movies. “And, because we believe that educating the movie industry is a crucial first step toward achieving the changes we seek in reducing youth exposure to smoking depictions and eliminating cigarette brand appearances, we are very pleased to report that the DGA [Directors Guild of America] has agreed to feature an article on this important subject in the June issue of its widely circulated magazine.”
Speaking on behalf of the DGA, LeVar Burton said that while the guild “is firm in its belief that allowing a character to smoke is a creative decision to be made by individual directors,” those directors “are very aware of the impact films can have on the public consciousness.” As a result, the guild established a Task Force on Social Responsibility that issued a number of recommendations to the guild, including:
“DGA has begun to develop, design, and prepare to launch this educational campaign…This campaign is different from other efforts to curb the portrayals of smoking in films because it is an entertainment industry-initiated campaign,” Mr. Burton said. “The goals of the campaign—which will be launched shortly—are to use written materials, member meetings, and peer-to-peer outreach to educate and inform our director members. We are hopeful that our outreach campaign will serve as a template that will be used by others in our industry and result in new ways of thinking that will show up on the screen.”
Stanton Glantz of the University of California, San Francisco, made several recommendations to the committee and the movie industry: give an R rating to movies depicting smoking; require motion picture studios to certify that they received no payment for placing tobacco products in their movies; end brand identification in movies; and run free anti-smoking advertisements before films depicting smoking. “Apologists for the studios like to say that smoking in the movies just reflects real life,” he said. “This is not true. Since 1950 the percentage of Americans who smoke has been cut in half, yet smoking in the movies is increasing…Between 1999 and 2003, fully 80% of PG-13 movies included smoking. Over that same period, American movies delivered over 8 billion smoking impressions to 6-17 year olds in the United States in theaters and uncounted billions of more impressions via television and video release.”
Additionally, Mr. Glantz said that based on the results from the Dartmouth study, “we have estimated that 390,000 kids start smoking every year because of smoking in the movies, enough to replace almost every smoker that the tobacco industry kills each year.”
Steven Yerrid of the Yerrid Law Firm spoke about how the state budget crisis is affecting Florida’s use of its tobacco settlement funds. “The $13 billion the State was awarded in 1997 was meant to repay our citizens for years of sickness and to prevent future generations from the same fate. Today, legislators now raid that settlement money annually to fill budget gaps and vacate taxpayer funds by using tobacco settlement monies as appropriation replacements,” he said. Adding that Florida’s Tobacco Control Program had been funded at $80 million, Mr. Yerrid pointed out that this year the program is funded at $1 million. “In a stunning caveat to this year’s merely symbolic $1 million appropriation for youth smoking prevention, Florida lawmakers approved a proviso that prohibits any of that money from being used for advertising or marketing. Ironically, these are the very efforts that proved dramatically successful in reducing youth smoking throughout the state by 50 percent among middle school students and 35 percent among high schoolers, just in the first four years of the TRUTH campaign.”
