Smoke and mirrors Health advocates have continually recommended restricting the tobacco industry from marketing to children. And with good reason. Internal tobacco industry documents clearly reveal a strategy which targets young people to replace adult smokers who quit or die. While the television industry voluntarily removed cigarette advertising from the airwaves and networks which cater to teens like MTV frown on videos with smoking, Hollywood movies are grossly behind the learning curve. The use of harsh, sexually derived profanity or depictions of drug use exclude a film from a G-rating.
Cigarettes are legal.
You can take your child to the park and see people smoking. But few children at the local park will see Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, or Julia Roberts seductively lighting up. Sure smoking is legal, but so is saying the 'f' word. According to Taylor, the MPAA has no plans to visit the smoking issue, despite the fact that numerous studies reveal motion pictures may bear some of the responsibility for underage cigarette use because smoking in movies is so pervasive. This distorted portrait of the incidence of smoking leads kids to believe that everybody's doing it, when in fact smoking is decreasing in every other age group.