The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column, Friday August 1 2003

Philip Morris International has asked us to point out that, contrary to any suggestion that may have been given in this article, the company does not engage in product placement in movies. It says that, in fact, it routinely declines requests from the entertainment industry for products or permission to use its products.

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For

Tobacco advertising was recently banned in the UK. So when our kids go to see a movie, they won't be targets for cigarette promotions. Right? Think again. The tobacco industry sells a product that will kill half of all its regular users. Just to stay in business, tobacco companies must replace every customer their products kill. And that means more than 300 new recruits each day in the UK alone.

To boost their profits, the companies rely on a tried and tested platform for their products: the movies. In the 1940s and 50s, millions lit up their first cigarette while watching Bogie or Bette Davis. The smoke may since have been banished from the back row, but the cigarette still looms large on screen.

The strategy still works. We know that children whose favourite movie stars smoke on screen are more likely to smoke themselves. But does this really mean that smoking in movies can encourage a child to take up the habit? There is now strong evidence that it can. A study recently published in the Lancet followed non-smoking youngsters aged 11-15. It found that the more times a youngster saw smoking on screen, the more likely they were to begin smoking.

When actors smoke in films they do a better job than billboards at advertising cigarettes. They are showing children that it is cool to smoke. That's why the tobacco companies have been willing to pay actors to smoke on screen. In 1983, Brown & Williamson paid £320,000 to Sylvester Stallone to smoke its cigarettes in five films, including Rambo.

Product placement is a subtle and powerful form of tobacco promotion. And it is particularly effective on young people. Research shows that the under-18s are the most likely age group to recall tobacco products used in a movie. That's why Philip Morris supplied free cigarettes to film productions including the PG-rated Grease, The Muppet Movie and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?.

Widespread smoking in the movies teaches young people how to smoke. It teaches them that they can emulate movie stars by smoking. It gives the false impression that most people accept smoking and second-hand smoke.

What the films don't show is the reality of smoking: hacking cough, bad breath and stained fingers. And they don't even touch on what smoking can lead to: sexual impotence, lung cancer, heart attack, respiratory problems, infertility - the list goes on. The vast majority of smoking in films has nothing to do with artistic freedom and everything to do with clever marketing.

In the real world, smokers tend to be poor and less educated. In the movies, it is the powerful and successful who smoke the most. In the real world, smoking kills smokers. In the real world, smokers' families suffer while the tobacco industry accumulates billions in profits. In the real world, second-hand smoke harms non-smokers.

Parents have a right to know when film stars are paid to push cigarettes. And films that receive sponsorship from the tobacco industry should be required to declare that information.

The BMA does not favour a ban on smoking in movies. We do want:

* films to declare anything of value (money, cigarettes, gifts, publicity, interest-free loans or anything else) received from anyone in exchange for using or displaying tobacco.

* Strong clear, messages about the health risks of smoking to be shown before any film with any tobacco presence, regardless of its rating.

* An end to all tobacco branding in any movie scene.

Cinema's love affair with tobacco has claimed countless lives, not least those of its stars. It's time that Hollywood's fatal attraction with cigarettes is stubbed out.
SJ

Against

If you rang my late colleague Alexander Walker of the London Evening Standard when he was out, the final words on the answerphone were: "And remember, smoking is the slow way to suicide." He objected strongly to films in which there was too much puffing, and he wouldn't have thanked me for defending the practice even though he knew I was a smoker. But I do defend it, largely because of what the next step from the censorship brigade is likely to be.

For instance, is the British Medical Association, which now seems to agree with Mr Walker on the subject, not aware that drinking causes at least as much illness and cost to the National Health Service as smoking? Of course it is, but I don't recall any suggestions that booze or drunkenness should be banned from movies or given an adult certificate. And what about guns? Should we not censor them, too? Murder is a pretty bad crime, so perhaps we should frown on that too, thus emasculating most Hollywood films straight away.

No, the ban on smoking on film is not a very intelligent idea when at least 25% of the audience light up on a regular basis. It is indeed a bad and dangerous habit and I am absolutely with Dr Vivianne Nathanson, the BMA's head of health policy, that cigarette companies should be discouraged from placing their products in films. Too much of that goes on already and you scarcely see a movie nowadays that doesn't part-finance itself that way. But to pretend that no one smokes is another matter altogether. To divest 007 of his cigars might strictly be in accordance with the awful warning on my cigarette packet that smoking causes impotence, but in my opinion it might very well cause impotence in him.

My second and perhaps better argument is that I have never been convinced that films invariably cause the young, or indeed any of us, to imitate those in them. If they did, I'd have been sent to jail long ago. I have sat through so many enormities that even a lily-white liberal like myself has sometimes wondered what the censor was doing passing them for general viewing. Smoking? That's the least of it. And yet, here I am, a veteran of it all, and still pure as the driven slush.

I well remember defence counsels telling juries and judges at the time of Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange, in which a tramp was set alight by Malcolm McDowell and his friends, that their clients would never have committed a similar crime if they had not seen the film. Speciousness has never risen to such heights, and it still continues today. "Retrograde" films or videos (of which there are plenty) have been accused of everything under the sun, sometimes by myself. But nothing has ever been proven, and certainly not conclusively.

So I would be very wary of telling people what to do and what not to do via the movies. Better simply to tell them what to see and what not to see in the hope that they can make up their minds for themselves with a little pressure from us critics. The idea that Chicago is a dangerous film because Catherine Zeta-Jones has a cigarette in her mouth seems decidedly silly to me. I wish I could stop smoking, that's for sure. But I'm damned if it would make any difference if there was no smoking on film. Sorry Alex, my old friend. Hold on, I'll put my fag out.
DM

· Dr Sinead Jones is the director of the BMA's Tobacco Control Resource Centre.