It's official - smoking in movies causes teens to smoke

by Jennifer Jordan (Subscribe to Jennifer Jordan's posts) Aug 24th 2008 11:01AM

Categories: Teens, Health & Safety Babies, In The News, Media, That's Entertainment

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Word on the street is that smoking in movies is causing teens to be more likely to light up themselves. In a report issued Thursday by the National Cancer Institute ads for smoking and depictions of smoking in film make teens more likely to smoke. The report also countered the tobacco industry's claims that the $13 billion (yes, billion, when we have people starving to death on the streets and can't pay our mortgages) spent on promotion was to increase brand loyalty. Rather, according to the report, the only thing it increased was someone's chances of smoking--especially if that person was a teenager.

The report considered over 1,000 studies of how media impacts use of tobacco. It also noted that three fourths of recent hit films contained smoking, and that particular brands were easily identified in a third of the films. Perhaps as a preemptive strike six of the major movie studios recently claimed they would add anti-smoking ads to the DVD versions of their films. This of course has little bearing on the teen who sees the film in the theater, where there will be no such warning (only that smoking is not allowed in theaters).

According to Dr. Janet Collins, who runs the chronic disease prevention and health promotion at the U.S. Center for Disease Control, smoking, tobacco use, the promotion of both, etc. is "an assault on the nation's health." The report, whose findings she supports, was issued in a timely fashion: the Senate vote to give the FDA control over tobacco regulation.

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Comments (7)

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

mimi 8-24-2008 @ 3:47PM

If you are appalled at how much is spent on advertising, just look at the hundreds of billion dollars being spent on the war. D:

sfast 8-25-2008 @ 11:35AM

this proves nothing. nothing is offical at all. they ran studies, not experiments. their may be a connection but no real proof. i was no smarter then any other teen and i never lit up. i wached movies and even nascar WINSTON cup racing since i was 12

markycf 8-25-2008 @ 12:06AM

Thank God I don't let movies encourage me to do idiotic and life threatening things!

harleyrider1978 8-25-2008 @ 5:01AM

http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=23399

Scientific Evidence Shows Secondhand Smoke Is No Danger
Written By: Jerome Arnett, Jr., M.D.
Published In: Environment & Climate News
Publication Date: July 1, 2008
Publisher: The Heartland Institute

Exposure to secondhand smoke (SHS) is an unpleasant experience for many nonsmokers, and for decades was considered a nuisance. But the idea that it might actually cause disease in nonsmokers has been around only since the 1970s.

Recent surveys show more than 80 percent of Americans now believe secondhand smoke is harmful to nonsmokers.

Federal Government Reports

A 1972 U.S. surgeon general's report first addressed passive smoking as a possible threat to nonsmokers and called for an anti-smoking movement. The issue was addressed again in surgeon generals' reports in 1979, 1982, and 1984.

A 1986 surgeon general's report concluded involuntary smoking caused lung cancer, but it offered only weak epidemiological evidence to support the claim. In 1989 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was charged with further evaluating the evidence for health effects of SHS.

In 1992 EPA published its report, "Respiratory Health Effects of Passive Smoking," claiming SHS is a serious public health problem, that it kills approximately 3,000 nonsmoking Americans each year from lung cancer, and that it is a Group A carcinogen (like benzene, asbestos, and radon).

The report has been used by the tobacco-control movement and government agencies, including public health departments, to justify the imposition of thousands of indoor smoking bans in public places.

Flawed Assumptions

EPA's 1992 conclusions are not supported by reliable scientific evidence. The report has been largely discredited and, in 1998, was legally vacated by a federal judge.

Even so, the EPA report was cited in the surgeon general's 2006 report on SHS, where then-Surgeon General Richard Carmona made the absurd claim that there is no risk-free level of exposure to SHS.

For its 1992 report, EPA arbitrarily chose to equate SHS with mainstream (or firsthand) smoke. One of the agency's stated assumptions was that because there is an association between active smoking and lung cancer, there also must be a similar association between SHS and lung cancer.

But the problem posed by SHS is entirely different from that found with mainstream smoke. A well-recognized toxicological principle states, "The dose makes the poison."

Accordingly, we physicians record direct exposure to cigarette smoke by smokers in the medical record as "pack-years smoked" (packs smoked per day times the number of years smoked). A smoking history of around 10 pack-years alerts the physician to search for cigarette-caused illness. But even those nonsmokers with the greatest exposure to SHS probably inhale the equivalent of only a small fraction (around 0.03) of one cigarette per day, which is equivalent to smoking around 10 cigarettes per year.

Low Statistical Association

Another major problem is that the epidemiological studies on which the EPA report is based are statistical studies that can show only correlation and cannot prove causation.

One statistical method used to compare the rates of a disease in two populations is relative risk (RR). It is the rate of disease found in the exposed population divided by the rate found in the unexposed population. An RR of 1.0 represents zero increased risk. Because confounding and other factors can obscure a weak association, in order even to suggest causation a very strong association must be found, on the order of at least 300 percent to 400 percent, which is an RR of 3.0 to 4.0.

For example, the studies linking direct cigarette smoking with lung cancer found an incidence in smokers of 20 to around 40 times that in nonsmokers, an association of 2000 percent to 4000 percent, or an RR of 20.0 to 40.0.

Scientific Principles Ignored

An even greater problem is the agency's lowering of the confidence interval (CI) used in its report. Epidemiologists calculate confidence intervals to express the likelihood a result could happen just by chance. A CI of 95 percent allows a 5 percent possibility that the results occurred only by chance.

Before its 1992 report, EPA had always used epidemiology's gold standard CI of 95 percent to measure statistical significance. But because the U.S. studies chosen for the report were not statistically significant within a 95 percent CI, for the first time in its history EPA changed the rules and used a 90 percent CI, which doubled the chance of being wrong.

This allowed it to report a statistically significant 19 percent increase of lung cancer cases in the nonsmoking spouses of smokers over those cases found in nonsmoking spouses of nonsmokers. Even though the RR was only 1.19--an amount far short of what is normally required to demonstrate correlation or causality--the agency concluded this was proof SHS increased the risk of U.S. nonsmokers developing lung cancer by 19 percent.

EPA Study Soundly Rejected

In November 1995 after a 20-month study, the Congressional Research Service released a detailed analysis of the EPA report that was highly critical of EPA's methods and conclusions. In 1998, in a devastating 92-page opinion, Federal Judge William Osteen vacated the EPA study, declaring it null and void. He found a culture of arrogance, deception, and cover-up at the agency.

Osteen noted, "First, there is evidence in the record supporting the accusation that EPA 'cherry picked' its data. ... In order to confirm its hypothesis, EPA maintained its standard significance level but lowered the confidence interval to 90 percent. This allowed EPA to confirm its hypothesis by finding a relative risk of 1.19, albeit a very weak association. ... EPA cannot show a statistically significant association between [SHS] and lung cancer."

The judge added, "EPA publicly committed to a conclusion before the research had begun; adjusted established procedure and scientific norms to validate its conclusion; and aggressively utilized its authority to disseminate findings to establish a de facto regulatory scheme to influence public opinion."

In 2003 a definitive paper on SHS and lung cancer mortality was published in the British Medical Journal. It is the largest and most detailed study ever reported. The authors studied more than 35,000 California never-smokers over a 39-year period and found no statistically significant association between exposure to SHS and lung cancer mortality.

Propaganda Trumps Science

The 1992 EPA report is an example of the use of epidemiology to promote belief in an epidemic instead of to investigate one. It has damaged the credibility of EPA and has tainted the fields of epidemiology and public health.

In addition, influential anti-tobacco activists, including prominent academics, have unethically attacked the research of eminent scientists in order to further their ideological and political agendas.

The abuse of scientific integrity and the generation of faulty "scientific" outcomes (through the use of pseudoscience) have led to the deception of the American public on a grand scale and to draconian government overregulation and the squandering of public money.

Millions of dollars have been spent promoting belief in SHS as a killer, and more millions of dollars have been spent by businesses in order to comply with thousands of highly restrictive bans, while personal choice and freedom have been denied to millions of smokers. Finally, and perhaps most tragically, all this has diverted resources away from discovering the true cause(s) of lung cancer in nonsmokers.

Dr. Jerome Arnett Jr. (jerry.arnett@gmail.com) is a pulmonologist who lives in Helvetia, West Virginia.

For more information ...

James E. Enstrom and Geoffrey C. Kabat, "Environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality in a prospective study of Californians, 1960-98," British Medical Journal, May 2003: http://www.heartland.org/article.cfm?artId=23332.

Air quality test results by Johns Hopkins University, the American Cancer Society, a Minnesota Environmental Health Department, and various researchers whose testing and report was peer reviewed and published in the esteemed British Medical Journal......prove that secondhand smoke is 2.6 - 25,000 times SAFER than occupational (OSHA) workplace regulations:

http://cleanairquality.blogspot.com

All nullify the argument that secondhand smoke is a workplace health hazard.
Especially since federal OSHA regulations trump, or pre-empt, state smoking ban laws which are not based on scientific air quality test results.
Mark Wernimont
Watertown, MN.
US Supreme court decision 1992 NEVER OVERTURNED...

A U.S. Supreme court decision during the early 1970's ((Lloyd Corp v. Tanner, 407 U.S. 551 (1992)) said a place of business does not become public property because the public is invited in.

So, by that same reasoning. A restaurant or bar is not public property. We need to support small business and stop regulating them out of business.

Karenjean 8-25-2008 @ 7:55AM

Both of my parents are chain smokers. My brother and I left the house every day in a cloud of ciggie smoke; it permeated our clothes and hair and we reeked constantly.
Every day we'd get off the bus and the burnouts would bug us: "Gotta ciggie?" "Gotta light?"
I said "No I don't smoke."
Burnout said "F%^&$*g liar."
Eventually someone who my brother deemed cool asked him if he had a ciggie. My brother said "No, man, but I really want one."
The cool kid took my brother to the back of the school and on that day, my brother also became a chain smoker.
My brother would have jumped off a cliff if a cool kid had told him to do it; being cool meant EVERYTHING to him. He was like putty; whatever cool kid was with him molded him. He parroted their musical tastes, clothes, speech; he had no opinion of his own.
I can see how kids like that could get sucked in by movies. You watch a star smoke, you go to school and get offered a cigarette and presto! you are a smoker and think you are cool.

mandyv 8-25-2008 @ 2:56PM

Banning things is what makes anything appealing to children "forbidden fruit". They seem to know how to get their hands on illegal drugs, No shops, no advertisements, nothing, so why are we losing the war on illegal drugs?

So, killing people, rapings, and other nasty programmes children see on the TV has no influence then on their behaviour.
Do you ban it all? are we to just watch religeous programmes.

We will just have a nation of "pill poppers" given all the adverts for the sick, making us sick more like.

harleyrider1978 8-25-2008 @ 3:15PM

CALCULATING THE NON-EXISTENT RISKS OF ETS

"We have taken the substances for which measurements have actually been obtained--very few, of course, because it's difficult to even find these chemicals in diffuse and diluted ETS.

"We posit a sealed, unventilated enclosure that is 20 feet square with a 9 foot ceiling clearance.

"Taking the figures for ETS yields per cigarette directly from the EPA, we calculated the number of cigarettes that would be required to reach the lowest published "danger" threshold for each of these substances. The results are actually quite amusing. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a situation where these threshold limits could be realized.

"Our chart (Table 1) illustrates each of these substances, but let me report some notable examples.

"For Benzo[a]pyrene, 222,000 cigarettes would be required to reach the lowest published "danger" threshold.

"For Acetone, 118,000 cigarettes would be required.

"Toluene would require 50,000 packs of simultaneously smoldering cigarettes.

"At the lower end of the scale-- in the case of Acetaldehyde or Hydrazine, more than 14,000 smokers would need to light up simultaneously in our little room to reach the threshold at which they might begin to pose a danger.

"For Hydroquinone, "only" 1250 cigarettes are required. Perhaps we could post a notice limiting this 20-foot square room to 300 rather tightly-packed people smoking no more than 62 packs per hour?

"Of course the moment we introduce real world factors to the room -- a door, an open window or two, or a healthy level of mechanical air exchange (remember, the room we've been talking about is sealed) achieving these levels becomes even more implausible.

"It becomes increasingly clear to us that ETS is a political, rather than scientific, scapegoat."