"You'd be hard-pressed to miss cigarettes across pop culture. Dakota Johnson lights up in the dramedy "The Materialists." The chefs on "The Bear" smoke regularly, with season 3 featuring Carmy's efforts to quit. Sabrina Carpenter takes a puff a cigarette with a fork in her "Manchild" music video. The Instagram account Cigfluencers posts old and new photos of celebs - including Charli xcx, Natalie Portman and Leo DiCaprio - taking drags."
""Every few years, we see headlines claiming that smoking is becoming popular again," Ranjana Caple, director of federal advocacy at the American Lung Association, told Axios. "It's not new to make smoking look cool," she added. "Big Tobacco spent decades perfecting that playbook. Today's moment is a modern remix of an old strategy, and it hides the reality that cigarettes are designed to addict and kill.""
Tobacco imagery has become more visible across films, television, and social media. More than half of top box-office films released in 2024 featured tobacco imagery, marking a 10 percentage-point increase from the previous year, per a report from Truth Initiative and NORC at the University of Chicago. High-profile examples include actors and musicians shown smoking on screen and Instagram accounts that circulate celebrity smoking photos. Social-media creators and some viewers are normalizing or glamorizing smoking. Public-health advocates warn that the renewed visibility echoes historic Big Tobacco tactics and obscures the addictive and deadly nature of cigarettes, even as smoking prevalence declines.
Read at Axios
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