Editorial: Celebrities Influencing Teens by Ashley

We are constantly impacted by the people around us that we look up to. For teens, these people can range from family, peers, and most often, celebrities they see in movies. One of the unfortunate habits that teens can inherit from their “idols” is smoking. “Every day over 1,000 teens try their first cigarette because of seeing smoking in the movies.”  Celebrities are influencing young adults to pick up a cigarette each day. They are playing characters that smoke and because they’re in this movie, teens are more willing to go see it. This isn’t what we want our teens to get out of the movies they see, we want them to get the moral the movie is trying to convey because in reality that’s what most movies are about.

Some teens may say that they smoke because they chose to but in actuality, “smoking in movies is the most pre-tobacco influence on kids today.” Teens are growing more and more susceptible to movie influences. The movies they watch do not always have to be rated “R” to influence them. Studies show that “tobacco shows up in nearly 4 out of 5 of movies and not just rated “R”, “G” rated movies as well.” So the movies they watch don’t necessarily have be adult rated movies, they could be in Disney movies or in a family film. To pay for these “free advertisements”, major tobacco companies now spend $8.8 billion per-year marketing towards kids.  That means more than $24 million every day was used to promote their products.

Sometimes, celebrities are not always good influences that our children are following. Studies have shown “ 6.4 million children alive today will become smokers, 2 million of them will being prematurely due to smoking exposure in movies”. Teens are more likely to be influenced into picking up a cigarette from seeing their celebrity idol smoking in a movie.

A resolution for this epidemic is to require strong anti-smoking ads before any movie with tobacco use, regardless of rating. Having this will let a warning reminder that smoking tobacco is harmful to your body and it can lead to many life threatening diseases. These movies should be automatically  rated “R” like all of the other movies that contain drugs because nicotine is a very harmful drug that can affect your neural system.

Teens are influenced in many ways, mostly from the people they look up too, such as celebrities. They are being exposed every time we turn in the TV to a movie or get a ticket to a cinema film. Sadly, they develop habits that are not the ones we condone and smoking is one of them. It’s a shame that movies have, in a sense, lost their meaning to open us up to good morals; now they give us more underage smokers.