The Akron Legal News

Ohio AG joins coalition to protect young viewers from tobacco

KEITH ARNOLD
Special to the Legal News
Published: August 20, 2019

In a move to eliminate kids' passive exposure to e-cigarettes and smoking, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost joined a bipartisan coalition of 43 attorneys general to urge the streaming industry to limit tobacco use in their video content.

The measure is in direct response to the growing number of teens who use e-cigarettes. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of middle and high school students using e-cigarettes rose from 2.1 million in 2017 to 3.6 million in 2018.

Letters were sent to Amazon.com, Apple, AT&T, CBS Corporation, Comcast Corp., Discovery, The Walt Disney Co., Google, Netflix, Sony, Lionsgate, Viacom and Walmart to urge the industry to take proactive steps to protect the lives of young viewers.

"When the tobacco and entertainment industries link up to do business together, the health of your kids is the last thing on their mind," Yost said. "There is no reason a killer like tobacco should be highlighted in content targeting children."

Back in 2012, the U.S. Surgeon General concluded that watching movies with tobacco imagery increases the likelihood that adolescents will become smokers.

Further study two years later, determined that 350 youths become regular smokers each day and almost one-third of them will eventually die from the habit - that's 5.6 million of today's youths who would die prematurely from a smoking-related illness, the surgeon general noted.

In the letters, the attorneys general asked industry leaders to adopt the following policies to protect young viewers from the ill effects of tobacco content:

• Eliminate or exclude tobacco imagery in all future original streamed content for young viewers, including any content rated TV-Y, TV-Y7, TV-G, TV-PG, TV-14, G, PG and PG-13, and ensure that any promotional material such as previews, trailers, image galleries, and clips be tobacco-free. Content with tobacco imagery should be rated TV-MA or R and only recommended to adult viewers;

• Only recommend or designate tobacco-free content for children, adolescents, families and general audiences;

• Improve or offer parental controls that are effective, prominent and easy-to-use, that allow parents and guardians specifically to restrict access to all content with tobacco content, regardless of rating; and

• Mitigate the negative influence of tobacco content, from whatever source and with any rating, by streaming strong anti-smoking and/or anti-vaping public service announcements, as appropriate, before all videos with tobacco content.

According to the Ohio Department of Health, many young people who use e-cigarettes also smoke cigarettes and there is some evidence that young people who use e-cigarettes may be more likely to smoke cigarettes in the future.

Specifically, a 2018 National Academy of Medicine report found that there was some evidence that e-cigarette use increases the frequency and amount of cigarette smoking in the future.

The department advised that vaping itself is unsafe, even if a young user's behavior doesn't progress to cigarette smoking.

Smoking remains the number one preventable killer in the United States and causes more than 480,000 deaths per year.

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