Thanks to Marcus Tullius Cicero for blogging about some new findings relating child smoking to movie viewing (I had seen this report on the news last week, but forgot to blog about it).

This just seems so unscientific. There's one variable here that nobody has taken into account. If someone is smoking in a movie, chances are that it doesn't have a PG rating. These 10-14 year olds are probably watching movies with an R rating, stuff that's a bit too mature for them at their age. The sorts of kids that usually watch such movies do so unsupervised (it's rare that kids watch these movies with their parents, though some do). In other words, these kids aren't more likely to smoke because they watch movies where smoking takes place. They're more likely to smoke because of the lack of structure in their homes, because their parents give them the freedom at a very young age to go out and do what they like. I knew quite a few kids like that growing up, and most didn't end up very well.