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HARVARD SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH MAKES RECOMMENDATIONS TO THE MOTION PICTURE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA TO ADDRESS THE ISSUE OF SMOKING IN MOVIES

4/6/2007

Statement from the American Legacy Foundation®

In February, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), National Association of Theater Owners (NATO), Screen Actors Guild and a handful of the largest movie companies, heard recommendations from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) to address the issue of smoking in movies, which has been associated with youth starting to smoke. Leaders from the Harvard School of Public Health have urged the Motion Picture Association of America to “take substantive and effective action to eliminate the depiction of smoking from films accessible to children and youths.” 

Barry R. Bloom, dean of the HSPH, cited policies that Legacy, along with other major public health organizations, have recommended to the MPAA for years as a way to protect children’s health: attaching an R-rating for any new movie with smoking and other evidence-based steps to reduce the impact of smoking in movies.
 
The MPAA invited the Harvard School of Public Health to present recommendations on the smoking in movies issue in response to two actions: pleas from state attorneys general to make movies smoke-free by adding an anti-smoking PSA to movies, and requests from public health groups, parents and youth to give an R-rating to any movie with smoking; one national survey cited 70 percent of U.S. adults in favor of such a rating. To date, the MPAA has not acted on Harvard’s recommendations, which have been posted on HSPH’s Web site (http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/mpaa/).

We applaud Harvard in urging the MPAA to take substantive steps to protect our children and we now turn to Hollywood. The bottom line is this: research shows that movie smoking recruits 390,000 youth a year to smoking and it is estimated that 120,000 of them will eventually suffer an untimely death from a tobacco-related disease. What will it take for the major influencers in Hollywood to make a difference and save potentially hundreds of thousands of young lives?

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Contact: Laura Cruzada, 202-341-0324, lcruzada@americanlegacy.org