Restricting Smoking to R-Rated Films in Order to Stop Teens from Smoking is Ridiculous

Recently the wife and I were walking through the streets of Manhattan towards Madison Square Garden. As I was tying to convince her that attending the Big East tournament was actually a good investment (I was unsuccessful for those curious) I noticed an advertisement on the side of a bus. The ad read "Restrict Smoking To R-rated Movies."

For those of you who have either forgotten about or just never heard of this topic, here is a brief summary. A few years back a study concluded that teens who watched R-rated movies were more likely to drink and smoke cigarettes than teens who did not. Thus the movement started to restrict smoking to R-rated movies only so that American teens would be saved from the perils of smoking.

It is amazing to me how a group of people can take one thing and turn it into something completely different. Even more incredible is when that group is able to recruit even more people to their cause. If the study were to actually be carefully scrutinized one would find that only white teens who had been exposed to R-rated movies were more likely to drink and smoke, not all teenagers.

Restricting the act of smoking in film to only R-rated movies is one of the most misguided and utterly stupid ideas I have heard of in quite some time. This plan has so many holes in not only the implementation but the reasoning of it. There are a couple of these flaws that stand out at me.

First of all I believe restricting smoking to only R-rated movies should just be a first step? Why stop there? Alcohol, after all, is a very real danger to young Americans. Since a person has to be the age of 21 to consume alcoholic beverages I believe that all images of alcohol should only be in places or movies that can be seen exclusively by individuals 21 or over. If it is legal for somebody under 21 to be in an establishment there had better be nothing to do with alcoholic beverages there.