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Hollywood s Smoke Alarm Onscreen puffing is recruiting a new generation of kids. The American screen has long been a smoky place, at least since the 1940s, when Bette Davis and Paul Henreid in Now, Voyager showed how to make and seal a romantic deal over a pair of cigarettes that were smoldering as much as the stars. Today cigarettes are more common on-screen than at any other time since midcentury. 75% of all Hollywood films show tobacco use, according to a 2006 survey by the University of California, San Francisco. Audiences, especially kids, are taking notice. Two recent studies, published in the Lancet and Pediatrics, have found that among children as young as 10, those exposed to the most screen smoking are up to 2.7 times as likely as others to pick up the habit. Worse, it s the ones from nonsmoking homes who are hit the hardest, perhaps because they are spared the dirty ashtrays and musty drapes that make real-world smoking a lot less appealing than the sanitized cinematic version. Now the Harvard School of Public Health -the folks behind the U.S. designated-driver campaign-is pushing to get the smokes off the screen. Some movies show kids up to 14 incidents of smoking per hour, says Barry Bloom, HSPH s dean. Were in the business of preventing disease, and cigarettes are the No. 1 preventable cause. If there s one thing health experts know, it s that you don t influence behavior by telling people what to do. You do it by exposing them to enough cases of people behaving well that it creates a new norm. What made the designated-driver concept catch on in the 1980s was partly that Harvard and the ad agencies it worked with persuaded TV networks to slip the idea into their shows. There s a reason a designated-driver poster appeared in the bar on Cbeers, and it s not because it made the jokes funnier. | 
