San Jose, CA (PRWEB) May 30, 2007

Lindsay Lohan, Johnny Depp, Britney Spears, Colin Farrell, Scarlett Johansson and Leonardo DiCaprio Light-Up. According to Dr. Michael Rabinoff, celebrities are Turning Our Kids into Smokers.

In his new book, Ending The Tobacco Holocaust (http://www.TobaccoBook.com), Dr. Rabinoff discusses how celebrity smoking leads to the addiction of many of our children and underage teens, and their eventual early death.

Dr. Rabinoff says, “They’re puffing away in tabloid photos, on TV, and in major movies. With so many celebrities smoking in public and on-screen, it’s no wonder our kids — who already want to look like the stars — are starting that lethal habit.”

Dr. Michael Rabinoff, a board certified psychiatrist on the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry at UCLA, expert on tobacco issues and author of Ending the Tobacco Holocaust: How Big Tobacco Affects Our Health, Pocketbook, and Political Freedom, and What We Can Do About It, also points out that “Perhaps the most powerful form of subliminal advertisement is the practice of product placement of branded products and use of cigarettes by stars in movies. Scientific research has documented a dose-response effect of smoking portrayed in movies: the more children and underage teens see of smoking in movies (or the more they see their favorite movie stars smoke in movies), the more they smoke.”

What should parents know about the insidious ways famous people influence our kids to smoke? Who are the biggest offenders? How can we protect our impressionable youth?

Find out about how celebrity smoking leads to the addiction and future death of our nation’s children and underage teens. According to scientific research, over 390,000 children and underage teens in the United States start smoking each year due to seeing their favorite celebrities smoking in movies, and over 100,000 of those children and underage teens will die in the future because of that. Celebrity smoking in movies, and elsewhere, also has the effect of influencing millions of other children and underage teens around the world to become addicted to tobacco products, and to eventually suffer and die prematurely.

The vast majority of the new smokers around the world are children and underage teens. Currently, in the United States 80 % of smokers start smoking before they are 18 (it used to be 90%): that’s why some physicians and political leaders talk about smoking as a pediatric disease.

Get the answers about celebrity smoking in the book Ending The Tobacco Holocaust: how Big Tobacco affects our health, pocketbook and political freedom, and what we can do about it, and on the book’s website http://www.TobaccoBook.com. According to the World Health Organization, 1 Billion people will die from smoking in this century.

Find out in the book about the Hollywood connection to today’s tobacco holocaust, including:

—Whether Tinseltown is “addicted” to smoking. Are stars biologically prone to addiction? Learn about the “reward deficiency syndrome” and how that might affect some movie stars, as told through the life history of Robert Downey Jr., Nick Nolte and Mel Gibson. Learn how, of all the addictions they had, they were able to stop all of them but one smoking.

—Brazen tobacco product placement in famous movies, from Men in Black 2 to The Longest Yard.

—Why Jennifer Aniston, Orlando Bloom, Kate Moss and Keira Knightley will likely age quicker than other stars, because of their smoking behavior.

—The positive reasons Julia Roberts, Ben Affleck, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie stopped smoking (HINT: They wanted to help and save other lives besides their own.)

—Why efforts to curtail smoking in movies are backed by the World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Lung Association, the American Heart Association, and many other prominent medial organizations. These organizations endorse the following 4 policies as necessary to effectively decrease the effect of smoking in movies on our children and underage teens:

1. Rate new smoking movies “R”.

Any film that shows or implies tobacco should be rated “R.” The only exceptions should be when the presentation of tobacco clearly and unambiguously reflects the dangers and consequences of tobacco use or is necessary to represent the smoking of a real historical figure.

2. Certify no pay-offs.

The producers should post a certificate in the closing credits declaring that nobody on the production received anything of value (cash money, free cigarettes or other gifts, free publicity, interest-free loans or anything else) from anyone in exchange for using or displaying tobacco.

3. Require strong anti-smoking ads.

Studios and theaters should require a genuinely strong anti-smoking ad (not one produced by a tobacco company) to run before any film with any tobacco presence, in any distribution channel, regardless of its MPAA rating.

4. Stop identifying tobacco brands.

There should be no tobacco brand identification nor the presence of tobacco brand imagery (such as billboards) in the background of any movie scene.

—Public opinion polls have also shown that the majority of Americans support these measures.

—Why what the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has recently agreed to do, to consider giving some movies with smoking an R rating, is a good first step, but isn’t enough. Why public health officials are still upset with the MPAA. The American Medical Association states that “The Motion Picture Association of America’s (MPAA) decision to ‘consider smoking as a factor’ when rating movies does nothing to ensure that children and teens are not exposed to and influenced by on-screen smoking. By failing to implement a mandatory R-rating system for smoking in movies, the MPAA has ignored the gravity of the health threat that on-screen smoking poses to children and teens.” (http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/category/17569.html)

—Why parents need to understand that preventing their children from smoking may mean saving their children from a lifetime of poverty and sickness, and instead help them attain a lifetime of health and retire as millionaires if they invest the money that would have gone to buy cigarettes in a Roth IRA.

You can read more about celebrity smoking in Ending The Tobacco Holocaust (http://www.TobaccoBook.com)

The author of Ending the Tobacco Holocaust, Michael Rabinoff D.O. Ph.D., (Elite Books, November 2006, hardcover, $ 24.95, ISBN 1-60070-012-8, available at local bookstores, Amazon, Borders, Barnes and Noble) is a psychiatrist with many public presentations to his credit. He has a driving passion to get the message of the book to a wide audience, and the ability to engage experienced professionals to assist him towards that goal. More information about the book, and additional free information, can be found at http://www.TobaccoBook.com.

Michael Rabinoff, D.O., Ph.D., is a board-certified psychiatrist on the research faculty of the UCLA Department of Psychiatry and is also a Senior Partner in the Kaiser Permanente Medical Group. In addition, he is the C.E.O. and President of Biogenesys, Inc., a biomedical research and development corporation. He has spent over a decade researching and writing about the devastating effects of tobacco on our health, economy and nation’s politics. An esteemed psychiatrist and holder of two patents, Rabinoff has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal and Business Week, has published in the New England Journal of Medicine and other top-flight medical journals, and presented his findings on tobacco addiction and industry profiteers to the American Public Health Association and the World Congress on Tobacco or Health.

MEDIA CONTACT: Joshua Tyree, (503) 652-5216 (OR)

&#13