Children, constantly ruining things for the rest of us! Smoking is much rarer on the screen now because seeing pretty people puffing apparently makes kids want to smoke. And now a new study is trying to persuade us that watching stars get wasted with no consequences is turning our nation's impressionable youth into a bunch of alcoholics (what, they didn't see Knocked Up?). Soon grown-ups won't be allowed to see grown-ups having fun in their own entertainments.
To come to this not-really-shocking conclusion, researchers led by James Sargent of the Dartmouth Medical School talked to 6,522 U.S. adolescents between the ages of 10-14 on the phone over the course of two years about their alcohol and media consumption (side note: those conversations must have been fun/awkward). Over that time they found that the number of kids who drank went from 11 percent to 25 percent when those kids watched movies with drinking in them. The amount of binge drinking bumped from 4 percent to 13 percent. Of course it wasn't just movies that were leading kids to drink (family, peer pressure, advertising, and being kids also help) but researchers found evidence that movies have a greater impact on how kids booze than things like seeing their parents drink and having access to the stuff at home.
Apparently over a two year period kids see between 4.5 to 8 hours of on-screen drinking! Not that the study proves any kind of cause-and-effect, it just points out some stats. Still, the authors suggest that Hollywood cut back on big screen boozing as it has smoking:
Product placement in movies is forbidden for cigarettes in the USA, but is legal and commonplace for the alcohol industry, with half of Hollywood films containing at least one alcohol brand appearance, regardless of film rating.
Great. You know MADD is going to be all over this study and soon enough we'll be buying tickets for The Hangover 3: Too Much Juice Makes The Baby Go Blind and a remake of Coyote Ugly set in a coffee shop.
