Smoking among American adults fell by half between 1950 and 2002, yet smoking on U.S. movie screens reached historic heights in 2002, topping levels observed a half century earlier. Tobacco's comeback in movies has serious public health implications, because smoking on screen stimulates...

Tobacco presentations in commercial motion pictures are of serious public health concern because cumulative exposure to this imagery causes large numbers of adolescents to start smoking. An estimated 52% of adolescent smoking initiation is attributed to this exposure. To examine trends in the...