US: Netflix Curbs Tobacco Use Onscreen, But Not Pot

Source from:  NPR 08/19/2019

When is it wrong to show cigarette smoking on television, but OK to depict people smoking cannabis products, particularly in programming popular among young teenagers?

Netflix recently announced it would curb depictions of cigarette smoking in original programming intended for general audiences, after a Truth Initiative study showed its monster summer hit, Stranger Things, featured more tobacco use than any other program on streaming, broadcast or cable. There's tobacco in every single episode.

Tobacco advertising has been banned on TV and in the movies for decades; when it comes to characters smoking cigarettes onscreen, restrictions are largely self-imposed. The Walt Disney Company is one of the few studios with a comprehensive and public policy about depicting tobacco use in movies.

But what about smoking pot? The Netflix show On My Block is rated TV-14, for audiences, aged 14 and older — exactly the same rating as Stranger Things. The very first scene of On My Block, about high school students in Los Angeles, features kids doing bong hits at a party. There's a loveable, pot-smoking grandma.

And the Netflix romantic comedy, Always Be My Maybe is rated PG-13. One of its main characters smokes weed.

This troubles Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who for years has studied the cardiovascular effects of tobacco smoke, and the effects of tobacco marketing — direct and indirect.

"Rating a film for 14 year olds that's promoting substance abuse — it's like the peak of risk," he says. Glantz says although pot is widely regarded as holistic and harmless, compared to cigarettes, that's not accurate.

"Marijuana is not harmless," he says. "Secondhand marijuana smoke has the same kind of adverse effects on your blood vessels that smoking a cigarette does. Chemically it's not all that different from cigarette smoke, except that the psychoactive agent is different."　　Enditem