This booklet is made possible by the voluntary freely given Tithes and Offerings of the membership of The True Church of God and those who have elected to support the work of The True Church of God. Contributions are welcomed and gratefully accepted. Those who wish to voluntarily aid and support this work of God's Kingdom are gradly welcomed as co-workers in this major effort to preach the Gospel to all nations. Perhaps as you read my booklet on "Unwise Drinking" the thought occurred to you, what about tobacco? If a true Christian should avoid the use of alcohol should he not also give up tobacco? This is an important question that deserves careful study in the light of the latest scientific discoveries and the principles your Bible sets forth. THOU SHALL NOT SMOKE? If you hope to find the text that says "thou shall not smoke," you will be disappointed. Tobacco is not mentioned anywhere from Genesis to Revelation and for the very good reason that its use is of comparably recent origin. It was not known in Bible times. In fact, Western Europe never heard of it until Sir Walter Raleigh imported it from Tobago during the latter half of the sixteenth century. Nevertheless, the great principles of health for living are so clearly enunciated in the Holy Scriptures that no one need be in doubt as to what His attitude should be toward this habit. In this connection, it is good to read the apostle's inspiring challenge to Christians of the First Century A.D. You will find it in the twelfth chapter of his letter to the Romans: "I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God." There is a definite suggestion here that every individual is accountable to God for the condition of his body. Having been created by God in the beginning and redeemed by Him at Calvary, he belongs to Him by a dual tie. Consequently, he is not free to do as he pleases without reference to God's desires. He cannot with impunity debase, defile or destroy his body if for no other reason that God has a prior claim to it. God expects it to be presented to Him as a "living sacrifice," unmarred by self indulgence. TEMPLE OF THE HOLY GHOST The sacredness of the body was also emphasized by the apostle in his first letter to the Corinthians: "What? Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's. (1 Corinthians 6:19-20) This is in full harmony with the teachings of Jesus who said, "If a man love, me he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him. (John 14:23) The body of the consecrated Christian is a dwelling place of God through the Holy Spirit. It is God's home, God's temple. Consequently its purity, health, and well-being are to be guarded as a sacred trust. It is in the light of this great truth that all questions concerning eating, drinking, smoking, and the like should be considered. Every habit should be brought to the bar of conscience and asked, Is it helpful or harmful? Will it increase or decrease health and efficiency? Will it glorify or defile God's temple? Modern science has demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that using tobacco is one of the most dangerous habits anyone could acquire. In recent years evidence has piled on evidence that it is one of the major destroyers of health. When all the facts are assembled, it may well be said while liquor have slain its thousands, tobacco has killed its tens of thousands. 419,000 DEATHS PER YEAR Smoking is the single most preventable cause of death in our society. Each year, an estimated 419,000 people die in the Untied States as a result of smoking. Government agencies and independent economists estimate that smoking costs the nation as much as $100 billion a year for lost productivity, medical bills, and insurance premiums among other things. $16 BILLION IN 1994 In 1994 Medicare spent $16 billion of the estimated $87 billion for inpatient hospital care due to conditions attributable to smoking. WHAT OTHERS SAY... The following statement from Dr. Leroy E. Bernie, Surgeon General of the United States was published in The Congressional Record, May 21, 1958: "Many independent studies have confirmed beyond reasonable doubt that there is a high degree of statistical association between lung cancer and heavy prolonged cigarette smoking---while there are naturally differences of opinions in interpreting the data on lung cancer and cigarette smoking, the public health service feels the weight of evidences increasingly pointing in one direction - that excessive smoking is one of the causative factors in lung cancer". A study of six thousand eight hundred and thirteen persons by the late Dr. Raymond Pearl, of Johns Hopkins University, shows that up to the age of fifty the death rate of heavy smokers is more than double that of those of non-smokers. The number of smokers who survive to their seventieth birthday is one and a half times that of the heavy smokers of the same age. In his book, Condition Of Reflex Therapy, Andrew Sulter affirms that "the heavy smoker pays with 34.6 minutes of life for each cigarette he smokes. The pack a day smoker pays within eleven and a half hours for each pack he smokes." Harry Dinkman, in Risk Appraisal, published by the National Underwriter Company, says, "Habitual smokers have 62% higher incident on gas in the stomach, 65% higher incidence of colds, 76% higher incidence of nervousness, 100% higher incidence of heartburn, 140% higher incidence of labored breathing after exertion, 167% higher incidence of nose and throat irritation, and 300% higher incidence of cough. Dr. William J. Mirror, of the Mirror Co.,Rochester, Minnesota, made a statement,: "I do not smoke, and I do not approve of smoking." If you will notice, you will see that the practice of smoking is going out among the abler surgeons, the men at the top. SMOKERS DIE SOONER Powerful evidence against cigarette smoking has been produced by the American Cancer Society, covering the smoking habits of 187,766 men between the ages of fifty and seventy. Dr. E Colar Hayman, Director of Statistic Research for the American Cancer Society and Dr. Daniel Horn, Assistant Director, summed up the findings thus: "Cigarette smokers die sooner than other men age fifty to seventy, and they die mainly from heart attacks and cancer." This report was based upon interviews in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and California. The interviewers first asked the individuals selected about their smoking habits then checked on the causes of death of 4,854 of these same men who died within the next twenty months. Quoting again from the same report: It shows the death rate from all causes among the cigarette smokers to be up to 75% higher than among the men who never smoked. For men who smoked a pack a day of cigarettes or more, the death rate from heart disease and cancer is at certain ages double that of non smokers. "The risk seem to rise the more cigarettes are smoked--for those since dead, 745 had smoked as much as a pack or more of cigarettes daily for years. This was 319 more deaths than would be expected if these men had died at the same rate as the non-smokers." "Of these heavy cigarette smokers, 334 fell victim to heart attacks 163 more than would be expected to have done so and 161 of them died of cancer, 98 more than expected." Dr. Charles Cameron, Director of the American Cancer Society, summarized the findings this way: "If you smoke a pack of cigarette a day and are 50 years old, you have twice as much chance of dying within eighteen months as another man your age who has never smoked." Dr. Alton Ochsner, President of the Ochsner Medical Foundation, and Chairman of the Department of Surgery at Tulane University, has given intense study to the relationship of smoking and cancer. Here are some of his findings: "There is a complete parallelism between the consumption of cigarettes in the United States and the increase of lung cancer. LUNG CANCER Lung cancer has out stripped every other types of cancer in the recent years. There has been an attempt to blame air pollution, but I am sure air pollution has nothing to do with it. Washington University in St. Louis has taken a robot machine that smokes cigarettes just like a human being and used this to apply smoke to animals. At the end of two years, 44% of the animals had a cancer right where the smoke had been applied. It was indistinguishable from the cancer we see in humans. "Lung cancer has gone up in the same proportion as cigarette consumption wherever studies have been made - in Holland, Denmark, and England" Studies show that many boys now begin smoking at the age of nine or ten whereas they used to start at about twenty. This has led to the peak incidence of lung cancer at the age of fifty or fifty five instead of sixty five as formerly noted. "After the age of fifty five the incidence of lung cancer falls off. This is due to another factor. The individual who has been a heavy cigarette smoker for a number of years subjects his heart and blood vessels to the deleterious effects of tobacco and is likely to develop coronary thrombosis and die before he develops cancer of the lungs." OFFICIAL STATEMENT Research conducted in England is of particular interest because it culminated in a statement in Parliament that smoking was the principal cause of lung cancer. This was followed by instructions from the Ministry of Health to all local city councils on how to educate the public concerning the dangers of smoking. An official poster now been circulated throughout Great Britain carries this warning from the Medical Officer of Health: "It is my duty to warn all cigarette smokers that there is now conclusive evidence that they are running a greater risk of contracting cancer than non-smokers. The risk mounts with the number of cigarettes smoked. Giving up smoking reduces the risk." One of the most impressive studies concerning the effects of tobacco was conducted by the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research. The subjects of the research were 564 Seven Day Adventists, chosen because they do not smoke or drink. Their records were compared with those of 8,128 members of other religious groups, all patients in Adventist hospitals. The results, presented to the Session of the California Medical Association, showed that among Seven Day Adventists, lung cancer was only one tenth as common as among the general population and only three fifths as many suffer heart attacks. Not only did fewer Adventists in the test suffer fewer heart attacks, but the age at which such attacks occurred was much more advanced than for the other patients. Only 2% of heart attacks occurred before the age of forty four among the Adventists, against 8% for the other group. Only 11.8% were seen in Adventist people under fifty four, against 30% for the non-Adventists patients, and only 30% before the age of sixty four, against 62% for the public at large. The only case of lung cancer found among the Adventist patients occurred in a man who had smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for twenty five years before joining the church. These statistics and facts are drawn out also in a study of the Mormon group based in Salt Lake City, Utah which also forbids its members to consume alcohol and to use tobacco. MAJOR HEALTH EFFECTS The major effects of smoking include: 1. Shortened life span. Each year over 400,000 Americans and 2,5 million people worldwide die prematurely as a result of smoking. 2. Cancer of lungs, esophagus, bladder, kidney, pancreas and possibly the stomach and cervix. Smoking is responsible for 30% of all cancer deaths in the United States each year including 87% of lung cancer deaths. 3. Cardiovascular disease. Smoking causes 30% of all heart disease deaths each year. 4. Emphysema and chronic bronchitis. Annually, some 80,000 Americans die from lung diseases linked to smoking. 5. Underweight, sickly babies. Each year, the deaths of more than 2,000 children under a year old are attributed to the mother's smoking while pregnant. SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) accounts for a high percentage of infants born to smokers. 6. Environmental smoking risks. So-called "secondhand smoke" is responsible for approximately 3,000 lung cancer deaths annually among non-smokers and 150,000 to 300,000 cases of lower respiratory tract infections such as bronchitis and pneumonia in children up to 18 months of age. IT IS NEVER TOO LATE TO QUIT The risk of disease and premature death declines when a person stops smoking, regardless of age. With all this evidence to prove the harmfulness of smoking, it is surely high time for all sensible, reasonable men and women to give up this costly, health destroying habit. And for all who love God and desire to present their bodies "a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God." This becomes an urgent imperative: No one who regards their body as a temple of the Holy Spirit could deliberately destroy it with nicotine. HOW DO YOU BREAK THE HABIT? Medical authorities have made these suggestions: When you decide to stop smoking, stop it. Do it at once. Make a complete break. Destroy every evidence of the habit, including cigarettes, cigars, ash trays and lighters. If an urge of smoking comes upon you, eat a piece of candy or an apple. More effective still is earnest prayer for divine help. Tell God about your desire and your result. Open the door of your heart heaven-ward and the Holy Spirit flowing in will bring you both strength and victory in Jesus name.