Jay Hanna: The glorification of tobacco on TV and in film needs to be urgently reined in

If like me you spent decades growing your eyebrows back after overzealously plucking in the ’90s, or listening to your mother’s warnings that you’d end up with a bladder chill or an unwanted pregnancy (or possibly both) from venturing out in hipster jeans, then you too might be bemused to see these trends return.

But if younger generations want to revive unflattering bubble skirts and mullets, who are we to stop them?

However, we can all agree certain things should be consigned to the history books forever — namely smoking and sexually transmitted diseases.

Sadly, both are making a comeback, due in no small part to a current lack of public health campaigns about the dangers of smoking and unsafe sex leading to complacency among young people.

But while STDS never have been and never will be cool, smoking is receiving something of an image boost through popular culture and social media.

Advertising of tobacco products has been banned for more than three decades but the tobacco industry, which is worth more than $14 billion in Australia and almost $1.5 trillion globally, continues to protect its bottom line and its reach is pervasive.

According to nonprofit health organisation Truth Initiative, streaming TV shows can triple a young person’s odds of starting to vape or smoke. It points out that four of this year’s Emmy-nominated animated shows, including The Simpsons, contained tobacco imagery, while nine out of 10 of the year’s Best Picture Oscar nominees featured smoking, up from seven out of 10 films the year before.

While watching Jamie-Lee Curtis take a frantic drag of her fag while mentally unravelling in The Bear won’t encourage anyone to light up, seeing the show’s main star Jeremy Allen White smoking, on and off set, might.

Likewise promotional posters for the 2023 thriller Saltburn — featuring topless stars Jacob Elordi and Barry Keoghan — could have been a modern day Marlboro Man advertising campaign.

The music industry is not immune either.

The album most listened to in 2024, Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department, references smoking in four songs, while in the music video for Die With a Smile, Lady Gaga sings with a cigarette dangling from her mouth.

And Charli XCX, whose album Brat was arguably the most culturally impactful and critically acclaimed release of the year, summed up the ethos behind it as: “a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter and a strappy white top with no bra”.

While we all know smoking is dangerous, somehow it has never looked uncool, which is why limiting exposure is important.

“I’ve never smoked or vaped but damn a cigarette would look so good with some of my outfits,” a millennial male colleague told me.

Another confessed she’d been re-watching Mad Men and had to admit the stars looked incredibly chic as they puffed their way to early graves.

I have never been a smoker but I have also seen first-hand the devastating impact it can have from watching my grandmother struggle to overcome her addiction before it eventually killed her, following a short battle with lung cancer, at 68.

I am also of a generation that was bombarded with public health messaging about smoking with horrifying images of cancerous mouths and other body parts forever burnt upon our collective retinas.

Smoking, which increases the risk of 16 types of cancer — not to mention stroke, heart disease and diabetes — remains the leading cause of preventable death and disease in Australia.

Meanwhile vaping, which can cause poisoning and lung disease, is currently more popular among young people, with the number of secondary students who have vaped more than doubling since 2017.

Jonine Jancey, Director at Curtin University’s Centre for Evidence Impact and Research in Public Health, said vaping could “support the re-normalisation of smoking”, pointing to research from the Australian National University which indicated that non-smokers who vape are three times more likely to take up smoking as those who have never vaped.

One 20-year-old smoker told me she started vaping at 17 before moving on to cigarettes.

“Smoking is much cooler than vaping,” she said, adding that her favourite singers Chappell Roan and Dua Lipa both smoke. “But I will quit when I am older.”

Professor Jancey said while she welcomes the Federal Government’s introduction of a national anti-vaping program in schools, a multi-faceted approach is needed, including restricting exposure.

“Education is great, but we need to stop the exposure and access to these harmful products,” she said. “Our research shows vaping is widely promoted to young people on social media. These social media companies must ensure the health of their users is prioritised over commercial interests.”

Perhaps part of the strategy could involve bombarding social media and streaming shows with images of Gen Xers smoking, because we all know how quickly things become uncool when embraced by older generations. Like when Xers absconded to Instagram the minute Boomer relations started “poking” us on Facebook. After all, if anyone was going to post old photos of us in hipster jeans, it would be them.