Cinema and tobacco, the beginning of a controversial friendship for adolescents

The triangle formed by smoking, adolescence and cinema develops a dangerous friendship, a “smoking violence” on which we cannot look away as pediatricians. The relationships between the tobacco industry and the film industry allow a covert, complex, omnipresent marketing, difficult to evidence and to report, with modalities such as product placement and brand positioning. You learn to smoke, between other ways, with movies and television series and this oscillates from the predominant cinema with tobacco throughout its history, to scarce anti-tobacco cinema, passing through those films that have tobacco as their leitmotif. Keep in mind that at the beginning of smoking, seducing and attracting is what matters and this is sometimes commissions audiovisual media for entertainment; then, nicotine initiates the link that on many occasions arrives “until death separates them”.

There are numerous institutions (starting with WHO and PAHO) and working groups that advocate moving from evidence to action in tobacco-free film standards and legislation, as a measure of public health. Also our working group, and as a culmination of the II National Course on Smoking in Pediatrics held in 2019, has prepared the Commitment document to improve control of smoking in audiovisual media.

The XXI century must walk towards a seventh art “without bad fumes.” And every resource is valid, from government policies and health policies in the first place, to any other measure of citizen support and awareness of this practice.