SMOKING is for lowlifes, at least on film. A survey of 1990s blockbuster movies found that on-screen smokers tended to be poor and villainous. But while the habit may have lost its previous glamour, it retains a “cool” factor that is likely to seduce impressionable adolescents.
“In the movie Payback, Mel Gibson’s character was low-class and a thief. But he was unquestionably the hero of the movie and extremely cool,” says Karan Omidvari at St Michael’s Medical Center in Newark, New Jersey, who led the survey. “And teenagers are at the age when it’s good to be bad.”
Omidvari and…
