Anti-tobacco campaign must focus on film studios
Health minister A Ramadoss’s campaign against film stars like
Shahrukh Khan and Amitabh Bachchan smoking on screen has got a
thumbs down
from the world’s leading anti-tobacco scientist and campaigner Dr Stanton Glantz.
According to Dr Glantz, professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, Ramadoss should have actually stepped up pressure on Bollywood’s biggest film studios that make the movies.
Dr Glantz told TOI, “Dr Ramadoss should shift his focus and go after the business of making movies with smoking scenes rather than movie stars who just act in them.”
Dr Glantz said, “Minister Ramadoss made the same mistake America made earlier. There is no point in getting into a fight with movie stars. It’s just a waste of time.”
“In US, we spent several years chasing movie stars like Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts, asking them not to smoke on screen. But the real change came when we started focusing our campaigns on studios,” the scientist said.
Dr Glantz concentrated on Hollywood studios like Fox, Universal Studios, Warner Brothers and Disney and said since 2005, there has been a 30% drop in smoking scenes in movies.
“Indian anti-tobacco officials must meet Bollywood studio owners to take up the issue of smoking seriously. On-screen smoking makes millions of children take up tobacco. There is scientific proof that confirms this trend,” Dr Glantz said.
He added, “Motion pictures are made to make money. But they should not promote tobacco consumption among kids. Irrespective of whether directors get money from tobacco companies for showing smoking on screen, they must be persuaded to bring out policies against smoking on screen.”
Ramadoss had got into a public spat with several Bollywood actors over his comments that smoking scenes in films were encouraging youth to take to the habit. According to Ramadoss, 52% children took their first puff of a cigarette because of movie celebrities. Several film stars had then crticized him, saying he was trying to curb creative freedom.
According to the National Cancer Institute, films rarely depict negative consequences of smoking. NCI’s study had found that adolescents and teens who received less exposure to on-screen smoking were less likely to start smoking than those who saw more. Each day 55,000 children in India start using tobacco.
Experts say tobacco consumption in India — 51% of whose population is below the age of 25 — has increased from 15% to 26% in recent times and 14% of the tobacco users are below 15 years. Globally, tobacco claims 4.9 million lives a year, an alarming one million of them being from India.
Tobacco consumption is associated with 25 diseases with cardio-vascular problems, cancer and diabetes being the major ones.
Official statistics show every second man and every seventh woman in India is a tobacco-user. Over 46.5% men and 13.8% women use tobacco, which causes 40% of all cancers. About 250 million people in India use tobacco products like gutkha, cigarettes and bidis.
