NEW YORK — There’s a lot less smoking in the movies these days, a new report shows. Tobacco use on the silver screen peaked in 2005 and has been on the decline since, according to research that looked at the most popular films from 1991 to 2009.
Last year, more than half of the 145 top movies released didn’t show smoking at all. That’s a record for the past two decades. For films aimed at children or teens, the percentage was even higher — 61 percent. However, 54 percent of the movies rated PG-13 did show tobacco use. The report “shows that Hollywood is perfectly capable of making movies without as much smoking and people still come see them,” said the study’s lead author, Stan Glantz, director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco. The report was released Thursday in a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention publication. The Associated Press
