The 1st Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of the press, takes the view that the people should dictate to the government, not the other way around. But no one told a group of 32 state attorneys general, who have taken it upon themselves to instruct the film industry on the appropriate content of movies. This time, the cause is not raunchy sex, foul language or blood-spattering violence. It"s cigarettes. Many experts think that when actors puff away, they cause teenagers to do likewise. One study went so far as to say that 38 percent of all the kids who acquire the habit do so because of the influence of films. So all these state government officials want filmmakers to stop depicting tobacco use. It"s hard to fully credit the notion that kids start smoking just because they see Scarlett Johansson doing it. If movies exert such a mammoth influence on impressionable youngsters, shouldn"t teen tobacco use be on the rise The studies themselves are not as damning as they purport to be. They indicate that kids who watch more movies with smoking are more likely to smoke. But a correlation does not necessarily show a cause: Just because there is lots of beer drinking at baseball games doesn"t mean beer drinking causes baseball. It may be that kids see a star light up and rush out to imitate him. Or it may be that teens who are inclined to smoke anyway are also inclined to see the sort of movies that feature smoking. Michael Siegel, a physician and professor, believes the studies greatly exaggerate the impact of tobacco in films. "It is simply one of a large number of ways in which youths are exposed to positive images of smoking(which includes advertisements, television movies, television shows, DVDs, Internet, music videos, and a variety of other sources)," he told me in an e-mail interview. "To single out smoking in movies as THE cause of youth smoking initiation for a large percentage of kids is ridiculous. Putting an R rating on smoky movies probably wouldn"t do much to reduce teenagers" exposure. Some 75 percent of new releases that feature smoking are already rated R and a lot of them are accessible even to preteens. Siegel points out that applying R ratings to films just because they feature full-frontal shots of cigarettes may backfire. Parents anxious about sex and violence may stop paying attention to the rating system once it factors in smoking. " So you could actually end up with more kids seeing films with smoking. It is implied in the text that the government ______.

A. has to abide by the 1st Amendment strictly
B. has no right to restrict the content of movies
C. has responsibility to protect freedom of speech
D. knows well about what is inappropriate for movies