In 2015, 4.6 million middle and high school students labeled themselves current tobacco users, and e-cigarette usage is spiking among middle school students. And while it might seem harmless to some- It's just an image! They might not even really smoke!-it's the proliferation of this imagery that will slowly chip away at all our progress.Ī 2015 study of 200 young adults proved that exposure to depictions of cigarette-use on social media can “predict future smoking tendency, over and above the influence of TV and movie depictions of smoking.” And while smoking has declined among adolescents, the rates are still high. The cigarettes in these Instagram images are gratuitous to the point of confusing a lazy attempt at being cool and oh-so-candid. Cigarettes have their time and place in art-when they're needed for authenticity, like in Mad Men, or to lend a subversive quality, like in vintage fashion editorials, when we just started to know better but turned a blind eye.
