As someone who grew up in the 1950s, my impressionable years were full of messages that promoted smoking. My father smoked. I saw TV ads where “doctors” endorsed Camels as their cigarette of choice. And I watched countless portrayals of people lighting up in movies. While smoking was common in those days, seeing it onscreen captured my young mind in a special way. Movie stars made smoking look glamorous and cool, and aspirational. I certainly wanted to do it once I was old enough.
We didn’t realize it back then, but cinematic characters weren’t puffing away simply for the sake of emulating real life: The tobacco industry and Hollywood were partners in a mutually beneficial marketing campaign. In the early days, movie stars not only smoked onscreen, but also appeared in ads for specific brands—some of which cross-promoted the actor’s next film. Then, once TVs became ubiquitous in households across America, tobacco companies shifted their attention to the small screen, sponsoring shows whose characters smoked and sometimes appeared in commercials (perhaps you remember Fred Flintstone enjoying his Winstons).
Things did begin to change in the 1970s, when cigarette ads were banned from TV and radio, due to growing awareness of the health consequences of smoking. However, the tobacco giants responded by ramping up their efforts for product placements in movies during the 1980s and 1990s. This may come as a surprise, but research shows that by the early 2000s, smoking was once again as common in film as it was in the 1950s.
An inflection point came in the mid-aughts, when the film industry faced mounting pressure from health organizations and state attorneys general to cut smoking from movies aimed at young audiences. For a time, movie studios did reduce tobacco use in youth-rated films (G, PG, and PG-13)—but the progress was short-lived. According to an analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, tobacco use more than doubled in PG-13 movies between 2010 and 2018. More recently, a report by Truth Initiative, an anti-tobacco nonprofit, found that of all top-grossing movies in 2023, 41 percent portrayed tobacco use—as did half of the 15 streaming series most popular among 15- to 24-year-olds.
Since then, various news articles have highlighted what appears to be an onscreen smoking renaissance. Depending on your viewing preferences, you may have noted the trend on your own. Smoking has been prominently featured in recent high-profile films like Oppenheimer, Maestro, Anora, A Complete Unknown, and Emilia Pérez—as well as popular streaming series, including The Bear, The Hunting Wives, And Just Like That, and Stranger Things.
It’s true that some of those examples are period pieces (and biographical in some cases), and it may make sense for the scripts to include smoking. But there are also plenty of gratuitous depictions of smoking onscreen today; they’re used not for historical accuracy, but as emotional shorthand to convey something about the characters. And even if that “something” isn’t necessarily positive—rebelliousness, recklessness—it can still be construed as cool, edgy, or otherwise desirable by young viewers. That’s what has health organizations, including the American Lung Association and American Academy of Pediatrics, concerned.
I share that concern. A large body of research has found that as kids’ exposure to smoking in the media goes up, so does their likelihood of taking up the habit. Back in 2012, the U.S. Surgeon General concluded that there’s sufficient evidence of a cause/effect relationship. Yet popular culture has lately been going in the wrong direction—normalizing or glamorizing smoking, without showing viewers its consequences. The protagonist in The Bear gets to look brooding and deep as he takes a drag on his cigarette. But will the show fast-forward a few decades to show him suffering from emphysema?
I did eventually start smoking, as a college student. Within just a year I made my first of several attempts to quit, but the addiction was too powerful. What finally worked was an experience I had in a pathology class in medical school: My professor showed us the lung tissue of someone who had died of lung cancer. I’ll never forget that sight—the cancer itself, and also how darkly discolored the rest of the lung tissue was in comparison to a healthy lung. I quit smoking fairly quickly afterward (though it was certainly challenging).
Most young people will not end up in a pathology class, of course. We need straightforward ways to counter the rebirth of onscreen smoking. The groups I mentioned above, and others, have suggested tactics—such as giving an R rating to movies that depict smoking (except for historical purposes), or requiring anti-smoking ads to run before and after such films. What’s clear is that we do need to keep driving home the reality of smoking. It’s not glamorous, it’s not cool. It’s an addictive and deadly habit.
