February 3, 2016
Guild awards ceremony, the American Lung Association publicly criticized him, which was reported by the celebrity website TMZ, the Dolby Theater where the Oscars are held announced that their ceremony would be smokefree, including e-cigarettes. (Full story here and here.)
There is still no official confirmation from the Academy itself.
Let's hope that this decision to stop promoting tobacco at the Oscar ceremony is foreshadowing a more substantial institutions response from Hollywood to stop promoting smoking by implementing an R rating for smoking movies.
February 2, 2016
The MPAA just announced that Hail, Caesar! — the new Coen Bros. film opening nationally on Friday 5 February 2016 — has been rated “PG-13 for some suggestive content and smoking."
The film is distributed by Universal Pictures (Comcast).
The MPAA began adding “smoking” descriptors – small-print labels – to its ratings of a small fraction of wide-release movies with tobacco imagery in 2007. Through 2014, 88 percent of top-grossing, youth-rated films with smoking carried no “smoking” label, including three-quarters of PG-13 films with more then fifty tobacco incidents.
In 2015, a UCSF-Breathe California analysis of the MPAA’s descriptors concluded:
The device of labeling one out-of eight youth-rated films with smoking may lead the public to believe mistakenly that it can rely on MPAA’s ratings to inform parents about the presence of and risk from smoking on screen. In contrast, the 2014 Surgeon General report stated that an R rating for smoking would reduce youth smoking by 18 percent. Reference
The Coen Bros. have made eight top-grossing films since 2003, and also had screenwriting credits on Unbroken (2014) and Bridge of Spies (2015). Here’s a breakout:
February 2, 2016
We just released a new report that evaluates the retail marijuana legalization proposals in California from a public health standard. While the specific initiatives are in California, the issues apply everywhere. Here is the UCSF press release on the report. The full report is available here.
EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE
11 am (ET), Tuesday, February 2, 2016
To coincide with publication in eScholarship Initiative
UC San Francisco
Jennifer O’Brien, Asst. Vice Chancellor/Public Affairs
Source: Elizabeth Fernandez (415) 502-6397
[email protected] | @EFernandezUCSF
Legalized Marijuana in California Could Hurt Public Health, Analysis Says
UCSF Study of Proposed State Initiatives Could Create a New “Tobacco Industry” If Unchecked
January 31, 2016
On 1 February, 2016 the World Health Organization released the following statement.
Films showing smoking scenes should be rated to protect children from tobacco addiction
The World Health Organization is calling on governments to rate movies that portray tobacco use in a bid to prevent children and adolescents from starting to smoke cigarettes and use other forms of tobacco.
Movies showing use of tobacco products have enticed millions of young people worldwide to start smoking, according to the new WHO Smoke-Free Movies Report – From evidence to action, the third edition since its launch in 2009.
“With ever tighter restrictions on tobacco advertising, film remains one of the last channels exposing millions of adolescents to smoking imagery without restrictions,” says Dr Douglas Bettcher, WHO’s Director for the Department of Prevention of Noncommunicable Diseases.
Taking concrete steps, including rating films with tobacco scenes and displaying tobacco warnings before films with tobacco, can stop children around the world from being introduced to tobacco products and subsequent tobacco-related addiction, disability and death.
January 27, 2016
Eric Crosbie, Patricia Sosa, and I just published “Costa Rica’s implementation of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control: Overcoming decades of industry dominance” in Salud Publica Mexico.
The tile says it all. This paper is an update of our earlier paper that showed that the tobacco companies understood that Costa Rica is a trendsetting country in Latin America and how they blocked effective tobacco control for years. Motivated by the FCTC and with assistance from the global tobacco control network the industry was overcome and strong legislation was passed.
(We have another paper coming out soon on the successful implementation.)
Here is the abstract in English: