Hollywood should follow CVS's lead and stop pushing cigarettes to kids

CVS's decision to stop selling cigarettes has been generating a huge positive response and, as I discussed yesterday, could make a substantial contribution to further denormalizing smoking and the tobacco industry.
 
I was just on NPR's The Takeaway talking about the implications of the CVS decision and they played a clip of the movie Thank You for Smoking that highlighted how effectively Big Tobacco used Hollywood to hook kids on cigs.  In my comments I made the point that onscreen smoking is the most important factor promoting smoking to kids today and an R rating for smoking would prevent the early deaths of 1,000,000 kids alive today.
 
Given that movies with, controlling for rating, budget and other factors, movies with smoking make  less money than those that don't there is no excuse for the big studios that own the MPAA (Time Warner, Disney, Comcast Universal, Sony Columbia, Viacom Paramount, and NewsCorp Fox) to instruct the MPAA to modernize the rating system and R rate smoking.
 
Unlike CVS, which is projected to lose money because of fewer cigarette sales, the media companies would come out ahead in making this life-saving decision.
 
Based on the outpouring of support, from President and Michelle Obama on down, it would also increase their public standing ... and, based on numbers in the 2014 Surgeon General's report, save a million lives among the media companies' most important customers.