I believe that the tobacco industry is surreptitiously subsidizing the making of movies with favorable portrayals of cigarette smoking. Usually Occam's Razor is the only tool you need to disassemble these sorts of hypotheses, but I haven't managed to cut this one up yet. We laughed, back in college, when we watched Now, Voyager in one of my film-studies classes, at all the dramatic romantic scenes that revolved around cigarettes, but after seeing Henry Fool , Whatever and Polish Wedding in quick succession, I can no longer recall why the smoking in Now, Voyager seemed anachronistic. Joe Camel injunctions in the world are likely to accomplish nothing as long as people can, without any risk of repercussions, make movies that show young children smoking, pregnant girls smoking, parents smoking, and parents condoning the smoking of young children and pregnant girls and each other. If we truly cared about our children and ourselves, we wouldn't put up with this.
Smoking is bad .
It's bad for the person doing it, it's bad for the people around them, it's bad for society as a whole. It combines the worst qualities of selfishness, suicide and procrastination. If you smoke, you should stop. This is a really simple issue. Quitting is hard, but so are lots of things.