Study: TV and movie characters are smoking less but still drinking heavily

The tobacco industry really took a beating in 1998. The Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) they signed with state attorneys general required them to give states $206 billion in compensation for the Medicaid and other costs of treating sick smokers. But the agreement also banned them from engaging in product placement deals for TV or movies. R.J. Reynolds couldn’t pay to have George Clooney smoke Winstons anymore. You’d expect to see fewer cigarettes in movies after a deal like that. But the size of the decline may surprise you.

A new study in JAMA Pediatrics by Elaina Bergamini, Eugene Demidenko and James Sargent at the Norris Cotton Cancer Center and the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College finds that the MSA led to an exponential decline in the appearance of tobacco brands in movies. Bergamini et al added up all the tobacco brand appearances in the top 100 grossing movies each year from 1996 to 2009. They find that the appearances dropped by about 7 percent every year, and then plateaued in 2006 at around 22 appearances a year: