But what about smoking pot? The Netflix show On My Block is rated TV-14, for audiences, aged 14 and older — exactly the same rating as Stranger Things. The very first scene of On My Block, about high school students in Los Angeles, features kids doing bong hits at a party. There's a loveable, pot-smoking grandma.
And the Netflix romantic comedy, Always Be My Maybe is rated PG-13. One of its main characters smokes weed.
This troubles Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who for years has studied the cardiovascular effects of tobacco smoke, and the effects of tobacco marketing — direct and indirect.
"Rating a film for 14 year olds that's promoting substance abuse — it's like the peak of risk," he says. Glantz says although pot is widely regarded as holistic and harmless, compared to cigarettes, that's not accurate.
"Marijuana is not harmless," he says. "Secondhand marijuana smoke has the same kind of adverse effects on your blood vessels that smoking a cigarette does. Chemically it's not all that different from cigarette smoke, except that the psychoactive agent is different."
Study after study has shown a correlation between kids' exposure to cigarettes in the media and their later use of tobacco, Glantz says. There aren't as many similar studies about pot, although some have begun to emerge.
But as pot legalization gains momentum, using it is becoming normalized in popular culture. A couple of years ago, Netflix showed up at a pop-up event at a West Hollywood dispensary and provided weed varieties based on some of its most popular shows.
These days, cannabis — as opposed to tobacco — can help make a certain kind of company seem cool, says Washington Post opinion writer Alyssa Rosenberg. "Marijuana has sort of a better lobbying message right now than tobacco does," she observes.