Facing the Facts: Tobacco Today
SURPRISED that a demand for cigarettes ever developed, an editor of the Harvard Medical School Health Letter asks: “Why did a waning vice, subject [in the 1870’s] to a good deal of mid-Victorian opprobrium, suddenly reestablish itself?” Yes, as a recent ad boasts to lady smokers, “You’ve come a long way, baby.” Historians credit addiction, advertising, and wars with winning public acceptance of tobacco. “After addiction, advertising is the industry’s most powerful ally in its battle for the hearts and minds of the smoker,” reports a recent investigator. True, but is there more to the story?
The Story Behind the Story
For Bible students the significance of the cigarette era cannot be lightly dismissed. Why not? Because the era—especially since 1914—has fulfilled prophecy. First, in 1914 ‘nation rose against nation’ in world war. Then, as Jesus Christ further foretold, human society was disrupted by ‘increasing lawlessness.’ As war disillusioned people and shattered their Victorian values, it paved the way for this unprecedented acceptance of the cigarette.—Matthew 24:7, 12.
In 1914 the world entered an age of anxiety, and the cigarette industry prospered. Many smokers turned to the habit to combat the tensions of what the Bible calls “critical times hard to deal with.” Advertising’s allure and nicotine dependency helped to make self-indulgence the new mood of society. Accurately, the Bible foretold that people in the last days would be “lovers of pleasures rather than lovers of God.”—2 Timothy 3:1-5.
All of this should help us sense the urgency of our times. Rather than ‘taking no note,’ as Jesus said some humans have done in a time of crisis, we can learn our lesson from history. The Bible encourages us to hope in God’s Kingdom, not in futile campaigns to reform the world—nor in vain dreams that the nations someday will kick their bad habits.—Matthew 24:14, 39.
Can the World Kick the Habit?
The prospects do not look hopeful for the world to kick its tobacco habit. In 1962 the British Royal College of Physicians first warned against smoking, but 1981 found Britons buying 110 billion cigarettes. The surgeon general of the United States first warned about the health hazards in 1964. But the next year saw record sales. By 1980 Americans were buying 135 billion more cigarettes yearly than in 1964, in spite of the surgeon general’s warning of health risk that appears on every pack! The fact is, the world now buys four trillion cigarettes a year.
Whether you personally smoke or not, the money in the tobacco business these days should tell you that governments and politicians are not likely to end the tobacco trade. In the United States, for example, although 350,000 people die each year due to cigarette smoking, tobacco furnishes $21 billion in taxes. It also supplies jobs, directly or indirectly, for two million people. And tobacco companies are big spenders. Worldwide, they spend $2 billion (U.S.) a year on advertising—dwarfing the combined $7 million that the American Cancer Society and the American Lung Association spend on antismoking education.
Or consider two agencies of the United Nations and their embarrassing split over tobacco policy: WHO (World Health Organization) recently announced that stopping the “smoking epidemic” in Third World nations “could do more to improve health and prolong life . . . than any other single action in the whole field of preventative medicine.” But the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) holds that “tobacco growing generates large-scale rural employment” in the Third World. The FAO describes tobacco as “a very important and easily tapped source of tax revenue” providing “strong incentives” for farmers “to produce tobacco” and governments “to encourage its cultivation and manufacture.”
Facing the Facts
Yes, the cigarette phenomenon, especially since 1914, calls for facing some hard facts. Some say, ‘If it feels good, do it.’ But the facts linking smoking with lung and heart disease dismiss such a shortsighted view. In England, cigarette smoking is said to kill eight times as many people as die in auto accidents. Worldwide, the habit “has wiped out more people than all the wars of this century,” says a report in the Manchester Guardian Weekly.
What about addiction? The hard fact is that nicotine creates a state of drug dependency. And many thinking people feel they cannot afford to ignore the moral and spiritual damage associated with it.
Moral Objections
Christians find the moral and Scriptural objections to tobacco use to be of even more weight than medical or health warnings. Tobacco use originated with animism, spiritism, and worship of man-made gods—all condemned in the Bible as degrading practices that lead one away from the Creator. (See box, “The Sacred Leaf That Caught On,” page 4.) (Romans 1:23-25) Smoking is unclean, dangerous, and contrary to Christian standards. (2 Corinthians 7:1) More importantly, addictiveness brings the habit within the scope of “druggery”—a condemnatory term used in the Bible for spiritually damaging and superstitious practices.—See the Reference Bible footnote on Revelation 21:8; 22:15.
Thus, there are serious moral implications in a habit that pleases one’s senses at the expense of one’s health, pollutes the air that one’s neighbor must breathe, and influences impressionable youths to begin doing the same. After some thought and perhaps painful reevaluation, many smokers decide they must quit—for their own sakes and for their loved ones.
Reversing the Process
To break with tobacco addiction, you face pressure from your own body and from your surroundings. As a smoker, your body is dependent on nicotine. You feel the same craving that a century of smokers have felt since cigarette smoke became inhalable. Billboards and magazines dangle the habit before your mind’s eye, always associating it with pleasure, freedom, adventure, beauty, luxury. Your fellow smokers tend to view smoking as normal, safe, innocent, pleasurable, stylish, sophisticated. You have made room for the idea of smoking.
In short, for you to kick the habit, you personally must reverse the process that hooked the world. Practical suggestions like those found on this page can help you buck the world’s trend, but the first step is crucial: Know why you want to quit. “The decision has to be made deep inside,” says Dr. C. F. Tate in American Medical News. “Once this decision is made, the biggest part of the battle is over.”
And what of the world that seems unable and unwilling to make the changes that you personally can make? No, human society is not likely to end by its own efforts self-destructive practices such as its love affair with the cigarette. But be assured that God promises to “bring to ruin those ruining the earth.” (Revelation 11:18) And God’s means for bringing this about—his heavenly Kingdom government—is your solid hope for one day seeing spiritual, moral, and physical health restored everywhere on this earth.—Isaiah 33:24.
[Graph/Picture on page 9]
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Cigarette advertising’s $2 billion annual budget dwarfs the $7 million budget of antismoking education
Antismoking Education
7 Million
Cigarette Advertising
2 Billion
(each square equals one million dollars)