August 29, 2011
We now have the date for the Tobacco Center's "It's About a Billion Lives" symposium. It will be from 8:30 to 12:30 in UCSF's Cole Hall on Friday Feb 3. The keynote speaker will be Ursula Bauer, the Director of the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion and Sam Hawgood will do the wrap up.
August 29, 2011
A new paper, just published in Thorax, entitled "Smokng in movies and adolescent smoking: Cross cultural study in six European countries, is the largest such study to date, involving over 16,000 teens from Germany, Iceland, Netherlands, Poland and Scotland, found that youth who were highly exposed to onscreen smoking were about twice as likely to smoke as lightly exposed youth. This paper is particularly important because the social environment and background prevalence varies widely across these countries. In addition, the study was large enough to control for the number of movies seen, which would capture other exposures such as sex and violence. As in earlier studies, there was a dose-response, with the larger marginal effects tending to be in the more lightly exposed kids. This paper builds on the already strong evidence that smoking in movies causes smoking and that there is a dose-response, raising further concerns about the practice of governments subsidizing films with smoking.
August 27, 2011
Simon Chapman and Matthew Farrelly published an essay in PLoS Medicine that appeared in the same issue as our paper repeating Simon’s well-worn arguments. Their essay is here.
Here is our comment on their arguments:
SMOKING IN MOVIES: ARGUMENTS VS. EVIDENCE
Chapman and Farrelly’s essay [1], “Four Arguments Against the Adult-Rating of Movies with Smoking Scenes,” reflects the same fundamental misunderstanding of the logic and implications of modernizing the ratings system that Chapman made in a similar essay in 2008 [2].
August 27, 2011
Government Inaction on Ratings and Government Subsidies to the US Film Industry Help Promote Youth Smoking
by Chris Millett, Jonothan Polansky, Stanton Glantz was published earlier this week in PLoS Medicine at http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1001077
Here is the editors’ summary:
August 27, 2011
See the ad at http://www.smokefreemovies.ucsf.edu/ourads/ad_sfm80.htm
Smoke Free Movies has launched a series of print advertisements in Variety and other publications. This advertisement first ran in the August 23, 2011 edition of Variety and September 2, 2011 edition of The Hollywood Reporter.
If smoking is essential to your film, stand up and take the R-rating.
Producers of comic book movies seem to think flying saucers and cigarettes go together. Other producers appear to be convinced that any melodrama set before 2005 is a solemn opportunity to show people chain smoking.
Do you believe either one of these things? Then stand up for what you believe. Take the R-rating.