Some teens start smoking because their friends smoke. Others begin because they think smoking will help them manage stress or lose weight. Recent research, however, indicates that over half—52.2 percent—of ten- to fourteen-year-olds who start smoking do so because they see actors smoking in movies. Further, the researchers maintain that seeing smoking in movies has a greater effect than traditional cigarette advertising and promotion on television or in magazine ads, which accounts for 34 percent of new experimentation with tobacco. In their study of over thirty-five hundred adolescents in Vermont and New Hampshire, scientists controlled for factors usually thought to have a strong effect on smoking initiation—friend, parent, or sibling smoking, rebelliousness, low self-esteem, receptivity to tobacco promotions, school performance, sensation-seeking propensity, parent education, authoritative parenting, and perception of parental disapproval of smoking. They concluded that none...