Gandalf smokes? I should do that too!

One recent study found that children who watch movies in which characters relentlessly consume cigarettes will more likely start smoking at young age. How to prevent this?

Teenagers who watch movies in which actors smoke have greater probability to start smoking by themselves. This has been proved with a recent study in the UK. The researchers came to this information by performing a research on 5000 fifteen-year-olds. They are now suggesting that this research should result with changes in the movie "classification", so that those who are below 18 are not exposed to scenes in which movie characters smoke.


Researchers from Bristol University say that there is a need for more precautions regarding this issue. But, members of anti-smoking campaigns claim that this is not proven to be true and that this whole conundrum is plain nonsense. They say that there is no evidence that what one sees in the cinema or on DVD affects on his decision whether to smoke or not.

The study addressed the potential impact of some of the 366 movies made in America between the 2001 and 2005, including movies like "Spiderman," "Bridget Jones" and "The Matrix", which all have scenes of smoking. Adolescents who have seen the majority of movies in which there are scenes of smoking have 73% more chances to try cigarettes by themselves than those who were less exposed to the influence of such movies. And 50% of them have probably already started smoking. 

Having in mind that the views on smoking are also greatly influenced by whether parents or counterparts are smoking, the researchers also collected data regarding even these types of information from adolescents. The results showed that those who do not have someone who smokes close by, are having 32% more chances of already consuming cigarettes than those who did not watch movies with the controversial scenes. 

“We saw a linear relationship between adolescent smoking and the number of films they had seen depicting smoking.” – says Dr Andrea Waylen, who led the research. “More than half of the films shown in the UK that contain smoking are rated UK15 or below, so children and young teenagers are clearly exposed.”

She adds that it is necessary to introduce a ban on smoking scenes in movies for children under 18 in Britain, and that such thing would reduce the rate of smoking among young people.

UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies sent a letter to the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), seeking from them to ban such scenes in movies for kids below 18, in order to protect them from "particularly harmful imagery".

According to the rules that are used for the evaluation of the movies, both universal and those related to parental control, there is a list of potentially dangerous behaviors which young children are likely to copy. They include drug misuse but not cigarette smoking. 

David Cooke, director of the BBFC, said that smoking is a major public health issue and that they had consulted the public very extensively on it in 2005 and 2009.

“Clear expectation is that we should be vigilant, sensible and proportionate in how we deal with the issue. There is, however, no public support for automatically classifying, for instance, a PG film at 18 just because it happens to contain a scene of smoking.” - says Cooke.

Simon Clark, director of the smokers' group Forest, said that idea that films need to be reclassified in order to create a utopian, smoke-free world for older children is not only patronising, but it is completely unnecessary.

“Today you would be hard-pressed to find a leading character who smokes in any top 10 box office movie. What next? Should government reclassify films that feature fat people as well in case they are bad role models? We go to the cinema to escape from the nanny state. The tobacco control industry should butt out and take its authoritarian agenda elsewhere.”

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Last-Name effect – An interesting theory.

Last-Name effect – everyone whose last name begins with some of the last letters of the alphabet were last at everything in school, and later, as adults, they are buying everything they can get their hands on because of fear that supplies will disappear. 

According to the new study, people whose last name begins with the last letter of the alphabet (Z) are making the fastest decisions when it comes to shopping. What could explain this weird phenomenon, which the authors of this theory called “last-name effect”? Here is an interesting explanation.

American obsession with alphabetical order, especially in the education system, often places those whose last name begins with a letter “Z” at the end of the line, causing different kind of suffering in life of those persons. For example – they are always last in line at the canteen and the other kids are taking all the chocolate milk before them…also, in most cases, they are placed in the last rows in the classroom, so they have to put a great effort to get the attention of teachers. Later in life of those persons, as soon as they see a product that is discounted (or if someone offers them something to buy) they are immediately buying them because they have a fear that the supplies will disappear. In those moments, they finally have “chocolate milk” within their reach.

“For years, simply because of your name, you've received inequitable treatment. So when you get to exercise control, you seize on opportunity. It's a coping strategy, and over time it becomes a natural way to respond” – explains Kurt Carlson, an assistant professor at Georgetown's McDonough School of Business and a co-author of the paper on this subject.

He and Jacqueline Conard, an assistant professor at the Massey Graduate School of Business at Belmont University, have uncovered the “last-name effect” through an experiment.

They selected a group of students and send them an e-mail, offering them free tickets to a basketball game.  Within that e-mail, they highlighted that the offer is limited. The average response time of people whose last names begins with some of the last nine letters of the alphabet (from R to Z) was 19.38 minutes. Those whose last name begins with some of the first nine letters of the alphabet had an average response time of 20.08 minutes, which is a statistically significant difference.

These results drove “Time” journalist Sean Gregory to verify this theory. He took the list of workers and found Paul Zelinski, a production director for “Time” and “Sports Illustrated” for kids. Zelinski told him that he spent many days in the back of the class as a student in Brooklyn Catholic schools.

“In grammar school, I didn't mind, because there was this girl next to me who was cute. But in high school, it stunk. I couldn't see over the taller guys in front of me” – said Zelinski.

He claims that “last-name effect” makes sense. For example, he is always looking to make a quick agreement on a deal, and he recently bought a car over the internet for a good price. However, he is still afraid that he will be on the fringe. When he goes to watch a game, he often arrives two hours earlier, just to grab the best seat and have a good view of a game.

“I don't know if that has to do with being Zelinski or being Polish. I might have to go into therapy to find out.” – Zelinski said.

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"Ecstasy" is not causing brain damage!

After serious research, medical experts from Harvard have come to this shocking discovery.  They have also criticized all previous studies on the subject of harmfulness of MDMA.

Most recent research that has shown that it is not true that "ecstasy" causes brain damage, like it was considered and substantiated with many studies a decade ago, has caused shock and concern. How to tell the public now that "ecstasy" is not bad, given that its use is widespread and that it is the cheapest drug? Will these results encourage more drug use, and will those who had doubts whether to try the "party pill" or not now be persuaded to do so?

Research that proves that the pill, without which rave can not be imagined, is not harmful, is one of the largest that studied consequences of taking MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, official title of this illegal substance) and was conducted by a team led by Professor John Halpern from Harvard Medical School. The results were published last week in a magazine "Addiction".

Experiments from Harvard have shown that cognitive abilities of "ecstasy" users are equal to those that are "clean”.  Until now, the consumption of "ecstasy" was associated with the damage of the central nervous system.  With his results, Halpern openly criticized the quality of all previous studies that linked this drug with the brain damage.

"Too many studies have been carried out on small populations, while overarching conclusions have been drawn from them" - Halpern said, adding that some previous researches did studied users of the rave culture, which includes all-night dancing, lack of sleep and fluids, and which are itself factors that contribute to the negative cognitive effects. But, it wasn’t taken into account that ecstasy users consume and other drugs and alcohol, which can affect cognition, or that some of them might have suffered disruption of intellectual skills before they started taking "ecstasy".

Halpern’s study took into account only those “ecstasy” users who weren’t taking any other drugs and who didn’t suffer any previous brain damage. In his experiment, 1,500 potential participants were reduced to 52 selected users whose cognitive abilities were equal to those of the 59 persons who do not use drugs. Even samples of hair were taken from the participants to find out if they were lying about drugs and alcohol.

"Essentially we compared one group of people who danced and raved and took ecstasy with a similar group of individuals who danced and raved but who did not take ecstasy. When we did that, we found that there was no difference in their cognitive abilities" – Halpern says.

Although the results of previous studies indicated that ecstasy causes memory loss and long-term consequences on behavior, some scientists, like English Professor David Nutt, who was fired as chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs for publicly stating that alcohol and tobacco were more harmful than ecstasy, were not surprised with these results. "I always assumed that, when properly designed studies were carried out, we would find ecstasy does not cause brain damage," said Nutt.

However, Halpern did admit that the use of “ecstasy” has its risks. “Ecstasy consumption is dangerous:  illegally-made pills can contain harmful contaminants, there are no warning labels, there is no medical supervision, and in rare cases people are physically harmed and even die from overdosing. It is important for drug-abuse information to be accurate, and we hope our report will help upgrade public health messages.  But while we found no ominous, concerning risks to cognitive performance, that is quite different from concluding that ecstasy use is ‘risk-free’."

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