Exposure to smoking in movies has been linked with adolescent smoking initiation in some studies. Smoking depicted in movies is a major and growing public-health problem. Concern over smoking in movies led WHO to make ‘Smoke Free Film’ a theme of 2003 World No Tobacco Day. A recent research undertook a study to ascertain whether exposure to smoking in movies predicts smoking initiation.

Researchers from the U. S. assessed exposure to smoking shown in movies in 3547 adolescents, aged 10-14 years, who reported in a baseline survey that they had never tried smoking. Exposure to smoking in movies was estimated for individual respondents on the basis of the number of smoking occurrences viewed in unique samples of 50 movies, which were randomly selected from a larger sample pool of popular contemporary movies. They then successfully re-contacted 2603 (73%) students 13-26 months later for a follow-up interview to determine whether they had initiated smoking.

It was found that overall, 10% of the students initiated smoking during the follow-up period. In the group where there was highest exposure to movie smoking, 17% (107) of students had initiated smoking, compared with only 3% (22) in the group least exposed to movie smoking. After controlling for baseline characteristics, adolescents in the group of highest exposure to movie smoking were 2·7 times more likely to initiate smoking compared with those in the lowest quartile. The effect of exposure to movie smoking was stronger in adolescents with non-smoking parents than in those whose parent smoked. In this study, 52·2% of smoking initiation can be attributed to exposure to smoking in movies.

The results provide strong evidence that viewing smoking in movies promotes smoking initiation among adolescents.