I ran the Smokefree Movies campaign from 2001 through my retirement from UCSF in 2020. This education/advocacy campaign put pressure on the motion picture industry to stop promoting tobacco to young audiences through specific policy changes. We advocated for these policies though paid advertising in the trade and general press and the Smokefree Movies website. We website also used data collected by Breathe California to report which films did and did not have smoking every week and who was responsible for the smoking. We successfully raised the issue and pressured management at several major studios to dramatically reduce the amount of tobacco in youth-rated movies and include a certification of no payoffs in films with tobacco.
Our partners at Truth Initiative highlighted the need to broaden the campaign to include streaming media and on April 21, 2021, we launched the upgrades Smokefree Media website to broaden the campaign and modernize the interface, including making the Breathe California’s data on tobacco use in thousands of movies fully searchable. was launched on April 21, 2021 here. Final version of old site is here.
Unfortunately after I retired no one at UCSF took over the campaign and Truth Initiative decided to stop supporting the website and it is no longer active.
While dated because the entertainment industry continues to evolve and the Breathe California database is not being updated weekly, the site still contains a tremendous amount of historical data, including the then-current Breathe California dataset, searchable research and news archives, history of tobacco industry involvement with the tobacco companies (including links to tobacco industry documents) and details on studio policies I am providing links (above) to copies on the Internet Archive.
Truth Initiative is continuing to publish research and promote policies to address tobacco promotion in media, most recently their 2025 report LIGHTS, CAMERA, ADDICTION: How persistent on-screen tobacco imagery continues to fuel nicotine addiction among young audiences. They reported:
Tobacco depictions in movies increased by 70% in 2023, according to the report “Tobacco in Films: 2023” from NORC at the University of Chicago, which analyzed tobacco depictions in top 2023 movies. A 6 percentage-point increase in the number of films to portray tobacco marks the first time this figure has increased in the report’s history. In 2023, films averaged 14 tobacco incidents per film, compared to about 10 per film in 2022.
These 141 movies contained a total of 1,989 tobacco incidents: 83 in G/PG-rated films, 535 in PG-13 films, and 1,371 in R-rated films. Compared to last year, incidents in G/PG-rated films declined, while incidents in PG-13-rated films increased and tobacco incidents in R-rated films nearly doubled.
Whether this reversal represented the fact that direct pressure on the studios has dropped off with the end of the older aggressive campaign or the fact that the studios distributed several “Legacy films” that had a lot of smoking is not clear.
UC published an oral history with me that contains interviews conducted in 2015 (with some updates) on the origins, logic, and progress on Smokefree Movies starting on page 319.
Stanton Glantz blog 