Tobacco: Hollywood’s Dirty Secret
The other night my five-year-old daughter said something that blew my mind. She said “Smoking is cool. I saw someone smoking in a Taylor Swift video.” She’s five years old.
This was not an isolated incident. In-fact smoking is curiously prevalent in American media: 50% of American movies feature smokers. (That’s 73% of all R-rated films, and 38% of films for children and young adults.)¹ and Americans saw smoking in movies about 20 billion times in 2014.¹
Let me quickly disclose my bias here: My mother died from lung cancer when I was in college. It’s quite black-and-white for me: I do not want my children smoking and it makes me sick that tobacco companies still earn billions of dollars in profits selling addictive poison.
How Bad Is This?
Lung cancer is one of the leading causes of death in Americans, killing about 160,000 people each year.² (That’s more than strokes or accidents, 2X more than diabetes.)³ It costs US taxpayers (via Medicare) $24 Billion.⁴ And it’s almost entirely preventable.
Officially, tobacco companies are not allowed to advertise in the United States. But they do. Every day, via product placements in movies, music videos and television.
How do we know? It’s obvious from the data: Again, 50% of American movies feature smokers. Compare that with the prevalence of actual smoking — only 15% of Americans smoke.⁵ (This is a small niche of society. By comparison, 15% of Americans do not use the internet, according to Wired.)⁷
So 50% of movies feature smoking, but only 15% of Americans smoke. This cannot be a coincidence.
Is This a Coincidence or Is Leonardo DiCaprio Evil?
Let’s look at the data: in 2014, the motion picture industry showed smokers about 20 billion times.⁴ (In advertising parlance, these are called “impressions.” And at recent national television advertising rates,⁶ 20 Billion impressions would cost about $1 Billion.
So the tobacco industry is getting about $1 Billion in ad exposure in movies each year. I’d wager that this is not a coincidence, and that money is in-fact changing hands.
Maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps the tobacco industry is not paying for this exposure. Perhaps the US Motion Picture industry is delivering a billion dollars worth of cigarette advertising each year for free. I doubt film producers are stupid enough to leave that much money on the table. But if they are, it’s almost worse! They’re propagating a massive public health epidemic, encouraging millions of deaths each year, and getting no financial benefit whatsoever.
But what can we do?
The biggest first step is to actually draw public awareness to this issue. If lots of people stand up and start talking about this, governments, actors and film studios will need to respond. So please start by sharing this post!
Second, support https://smokefreemovies.ucsf.edu/ in their efforts to spread awareness of this situation. If you visit their site, you can see exactly which actors, studios, directors and producers are behind this.
^1 https://smokefreemovies.ucsf.edu/whos-accountable
³ http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm
⁵https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/adult_data/cig_smoking/
⁷ https://www.wired.com/2015/07/15-percent-americans-dont-use-internet/
