Tobacco is not a good work partner and that is why it is prohibited in filming and recording.
Groucho Marx's cigars, Clint Eastwood's cigarettes in Sergio Leone's films, Bogart lighting a sensual Lauren Bacall's cigarette... cinema and tobacco have a long and fruitful relationship and there are hundreds of films in which some character appears smoking, if only for a moment.
But times change and tobacco has lost the social consideration it had decades ago. The links between cigarettes and a long list of diseases leave no doubt, and campaigns for smokers to quit their habit have made themselves felt in our society. This effect is also noticeable in the world of acting and today, on our screens, people smoke less than 30 or 40 years ago.
Even so, there are characters who are still linked to smoke and cigarettes. Tony Soprano or Don Draper -the protagonists of the series 'The Sopranos and 'Mad Men', respectively- would not be the same without a cigar in hand. Only that what they smoke little has to do with the cigarettes used by actors from other times.
Thus, until a few decades ago, the performers smoked real tobacco: cigarettes and cigars that, on the other hand, were habitually consumed by a large part of the population.
Nowadays, it is almost unthinkable that an actor would be forced to smoke real cigars. For these cases, some cigarettes made with herbs are used: they do not contain tobacco and therefore do not contain nicotine, which avoids the dangerous addiction of these products.
One of the most common brands in Hollywood is Ecstacy Herbal Cigarettes, which includes among its products marshmallow, lettuce, sage, clover leaves, apple juice, and honey, among others. These cigarettes are not innocuous, the brand itself admits, but its effects are much less than those of tobacco and its ability to create addiction is minimal.
However, the groups that fight against tobacco consumption believe that all scenes with smokers should be removed from our screens films from encouraging consumption. In fact, the University of California has a platform, Smoke-Free Movies (smoke-free movies, in Spanish), with which it wants to put pressure on the audiovisual industry and which includes lists of films in which not a puff appears.
