Don't let your teens vape
The Hackademy Awards (now called Breathe Teen Choice Awards) are given for smoking in films. In 2015, Bill Murray won for the PG-13 rated "St. Vincent," in which he puffed and puffed around kids. Seems 38 percent of PG-13 movies feature smoking (often, a lot!).
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that making an R-rating mandatory for any movie with smoking would reduce the number of teen smokers by 18 percent and prevent 1 million deaths from smoking among children alive today!
We hope they start counting the number of times e-cigs get fired up too (there's Johnny Depp in "The Tourist," John Cusack in "Maps to the Stars" and Zac Efron in "Bad Neighbor"). Just as cigarette smoking in movies leads kids to start smoking, we think vaping on the silver screen does too. And according to a new study, teens who vape are six times more likely to smoke cigarettes later on than kids who never vape. A 2015 CDC survey of over 15,000 high-schoolers found that 24 percent had used an e-cigarette in the past 30 days. That means an enormous amount of teens are on the road to becoming tobacco smokers!
So if your teen thinks vaping is cool and harmless, explain just how risky it can be. You sure wouldn't ignore cigarette smoking if he or she did that; don't ignore vaping either.
Distributed by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
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