ASH, 102 Clifton Street, LONDON, EC2A 4HW.
Tel 020 7739 5902 Fax 020 7613 0531

ASH Daily News
20 December 2001

HEADLINES

The effects of seeing tobacco use in films among adolescents
Exposure to smoke

FULL TEXT

The effects of seeing tobacco use in films among adolescents

The British Medical Journal publishes the study by James Sargent and others, that found that greater exposure to smoking in films is associated with more adolescents giving smoking a try.

The editorial notes that the tobacco industry has for generations promoted its product by associating it with excitement, sex, wealth, rebellion and independence. It is little surprise then that the tobacco industry has doggedly courted Hollywood, the great purveyor of fantastic highlife. But like most other relationships that have been deemed taboo, Hollywood and Big Tobacco make for increasingly surreptitious bedfellows. But this has not always been the case. In 1972, the president of a production company wrote to RJ Reynolds Tobacco reporting that all the characters in a suspense thriller his company was producing smoked, and added: “Movies are better than any commercial that has been run on television or any magazine, because the audience is totally unaware of any sponsor involvement.”

The revelation of payments to Hollywood production companies by the tobacco industry for inclusion of scenes with smoking were received with great alarm in the US. As a response, in 1989 a voluntary agreement purportedly put an end to the practice product placement in films. Despite this, however, there has been a dramatic rise in smoking levels in American films since 1991 and now apparently exceeds that present in the 1960s.

The paper by Sargent et al in the current issue of the BMJ provides powerful new evidence showing that the more smoking teenagers see in films, the more they are likely to smoke. Using a survey of 9-15 year olds, they related whether these children had smoked a cigarette to the amount of smoking they watched in films. Watching films with 51-150 incidents of tobacco use doubled the odds that the teenagers had tried tobacco, and watching films with more than 150 incident tripled these odds.


ASH Press Release: http://www.ash.org.uk/html/press/011213a.html
Sargent’s Study: British Medical Journal 2001;323:1394-7, 15 December 2001
Source: British Medical Journal.


Exposure to smoke

Conventional methods of measuring exposure to tobacco smoke, either due to active or passive smoking have relied on the levels of nicotine residue in saliva or urine. Now, researchers say, a more reliable and simpler method is to analyse a single strand of hair for a more accurate measurement.

A single hair will hold a months worth of ‘data’ on exposure in a centimetre of its length.

Clive Bates, a director of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), an anti-smoking campaign group, said that should hair sampling prove an accurate way of testing for nicotine levels, it could prove useful for health and safety examinations of workplaces.

He said: “Reliable studies have said that very serious diseases such as lung cancer can be caused by passive smoking.”

He added: “Three million adults are exposed in their workplaces.”

Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/health/newsid_1720000/1720128.stm
Source: BBC Online, 20 December 2001



Visit http://TobaccoPedia.org !