Jay Hanna: The glorification of tobacco on TV and in movies urgently needs to be curbed

On November 24, 2024By Pranco

If, like me, you’ve spent decades growing your eyebrows after overzealous plucking in the 1990s, or listened to your mother’s warnings that you’d get a chill or an unwanted pregnancy (or possibly both) if you ventured into hipster jeans, you too might be stunned to see these trends making a comeback.

But if younger generations want to revive unflattering bubble skirts and mullets, who are we to stop them?

However, we can all agree that certain issues should be consigned to the history books forever, namely smoking and sexually transmitted diseases.

Sadly, both are making a comeback, due in no small part to the current lack of public health campaigns about the dangers of smoking and unsafe sex, leading to complacency among young people.

But while STDs have never been and never will be cool, smoking is getting something of an image boost through popular culture and social media.

Advertising of tobacco products has been banned for more than 30 years, but the tobacco industry, worth more than $14 billion in Australia and nearly $1.5 trillion worldwide, continues to protect its bottom line and has a widespread reach.

According to the nonprofit health organization Truth Initiative, streaming TV shows can triple a young person’s chance of taking up vaping or smoking. It points out that four of this year’s Emmy-nominated animated series, including The Simpsons, featured tobacco imagery, while nine out of 10 of the year’s Best Picture Oscar nominees featured smoking, compared to seven out of 10 films the year before.

Watching Jamie-Lee Curtis take a frantic drag off her fag as she mentally unravels in The Bear isn’t going to encourage anyone to light up, but seeing the show’s main star, Jeremy Allen White, getting on and smokes out, that could be possible.

Similarly, promotional posters for the 2023 thriller Saltburn – featuring topless stars Jacob Elordi and Barry Keoghan – could have been a modern Marlboro Man advertising campaign.

The music industry is also not immune.

The most listened to album in 2024, Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department, references smoking in four songs, while Lady Gaga sings with a cigarette dangling from her mouth in the music video for Die With a Smile.

And Charli

Even though we all know smoking is dangerous, somehow it has never looked uncool. That is why limiting exposure is important.

“I’ve never smoked or vaped, but a cigarette would look so good with some of my outfits,” a millennial male colleague told me.

Another confessed that she rewatched Mad Men and had to admit that the stars looked incredibly chic as they made their way to early graves.

I have never been a smoker, but I have also seen firsthand the devastating impact watching my grandmother struggle to overcome her addiction before it ultimately killed her, after a brief battle with lung cancer, at 68 -year age.

I also belong to a generation that was bombarded with public health messages about smoking, with gruesome images of cancerous mouths and other body parts forever burned into our collective retinas.

Smoking, which increases the risk of 16 types of cancer – not to mention stroke, heart disease and diabetes – remains the leading cause of preventable death and disease in Australia.

Meanwhile, vaping, which can cause poisoning and lung disease, is currently more popular among young people, with the number of high school students using vaping more than doubling since 2017.

Jonine Jancey, director of Curtin University’s Center for Evidence Impact and Research in Public Health, said vaping “could support the re-normalization of smoking”, pointing to research from the Australian National University which found that non-smokers who vape three times as likely to smoke as are likely to start smoking, as are those who have never vaped.

A 20-year-old smoker told me she started vaping at age 17 before switching to cigarettes.

“Smoking is way cooler than vaping,” she said, adding that her favorite singers Chappell Roan and Dua Lipa both smoke. “But I’ll stop when I’m older.”

Professor Jancey said while she welcomes the federal government’s introduction of a national anti-vaping program in schools, a multi-pronged approach is needed, including limiting exposure.

“Education is great, but we need to stop exposure and access to these harmful products,” she said. “Our research shows that vaping is widely promoted among young people on social media. These social media companies must ensure that the health of their users takes precedence over commercial interests.”

Perhaps part of the strategy could involve bombarding social media and streaming shows with images of Gen Xers smoking, because we all know how quickly things become uncool when embraced by older generations. Like when Xers went into hiding on Instagram just as Boomer Relations started poking us on Facebook. If anyone was going to post old photos of us in hipster jeans, it would be them.