WASHINGTON -- Movies that show cigarette smoking automatically should be rated "R" to keep children away from scenes that glamorize tobacco and encourage them to smoke, The Lancet medical journal urged yesterday.
It coincided with publication of a major new study showing that smoking scenes in movies, increasingly common today, are more effective than advertising in getting children to start smoking.
Both the study, done by researchers at Dartmouth Medical School, and the editorial, penned by a noted tobacco control expert, appear in the current edition of The Lancet.
"These investigators provide the strongest and most convincing evidence to date that smoking in movies promotes initiation of smoking in adolescents, and show that the effect is very large," wrote Dr. Stanton A. Glantz of the Center for Tobacco Control Research at the University of California at San Francisco.
Glantz has founded an organization called "Smoke Free Movies," which is working for the R-rating.
Movies rated "R" are "restricted," with children under 17 excluded unless accompanied by a parent or adult guardian.
In an interview, Glantz predicted that the study would bolster those efforts, already backed by the American Medical Association and the World Health Organization.
Dr. Madeline A. Dalton and her associates at Dartmouth found that 52.2 percent of children in their study who started smoking did so because of the suggestive effects of movie scenes that showed smoking or tobacco use.
"As the tobacco industry has known for decades," Glantz said, "the subliminal effects of smoking in movies is a more powerful force than overt advertising."
He said smoking in movies is almost twice as effective in recruiting young smokers as traditional ads, which accounts for 34 percent of new tobacco use.
The study initially determined how often 3,547 children aged 10-14 had been exposed to smoking scenes in 50 popular movies.
Researchers contacted 2,603 of the children one to two years later to see how many had started to smoke.
Children exposed to the most movie smoking were 2.7 times more likely to have started smoking compared with those who saw the least movie smoking.
Smoking is declining in the United States, yet in in top-grossing movies, the frequency of smoking has doubled since 1990, Glantz said.
By 2000, it had returned to levels typical in 1950, before cigarettes were widely recognized as a major cause of illness and death.
Michael Woods can be reached at mwoods@nationalpress.com or 1-202-662-7072.
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