Silver Spring, Maryland, United States …. [Ansel Oliver/ANN]
Joshua and Jakoby Jenkins, ages 10 and seven, were on their way to a piano lesson with their mother when they heard Dr. DeWitt Williams, health ministries director for the Seventh-day Adventist Church in North America, on the radio announcing an upcoming smoking cessation program. Even though they arrived at their destination they sat in the car and listened. After the piano lesson the two brothers said, “Let’s get dad tonight.”
Joshua and Jakoby’s dad, Cumberland Jenkins, will graduate from a Breathe-Free stop smoking program at his next class. “I’ve never seen a person come [to class] with that kind of support group with them…him bringing his family,” says Williams.
With 800-number telephone help lines for people who want to quit smoking, a raft of pharmaceutical products, as well as perhaps the greatest social stigmas against smokers, there are still some 50 million people in the United States, like Joshua’s dad, who smoke.
For many, January 2004 marks a major anniversary in the fight against smoking: in 1964, Dr. Luther L. Terry, then the surgeon general of the United States and the nation’s leading spokesman on matters of public health, released a report linking cigarette smoking and cancer. Since then, anti-smoking efforts have dramatically increased; today, several states and municipalities prohibit smoking in all places of business.
When the surgeon general’s report came out in 1964 the Adventist Church had one of the few stop-smoking programs widely available. The “Five-Day Plan” was the original smoking-cessation program started in 1959. It was revised in 1984 and named “Breathe-Free.”
Smoking is not something the church can ignore as a “secular” issue, says Williams. “Any time you have more than 400,000 people a year dying from something, it’s a moral issue. More people die from smoking than AIDS, homicides and drugs combined.”
But today Adventists aren’t alone, there is also wide awareness of the dangers of smoking–an epidemic that Adventists several generations ago were fighting to bring to light.
In the 1960s, the “Five-Day Plan” taught quitting “cold turkey” after five days. However, now that nicotine is known as being more addictive than heroin or cocaine, medical professionals treat smoking as an addictive brain disease to nicotine, according to Linda Hyder Ferry, M.D., M.P.H, associate professor of preventive medicine at the School of Medicine and School of Public Health at Loma Linda University, an Adventist institution in Southern California.
The originator of the medication Zyban, which uses bupropion, an antidepressant, to reduce nicotine dependency, Ferry has teamed up with “Signs of the Times,” a church magazine based in Nampa, Idaho, to recast the Adventist Church as a resource to help smokers quit. On March 1, a 16-page stop-smoking resource brochure will be available for
all Adventist churches, hospitals and clinics.
Most smokers tried their first cigarette before the age of 18, according to Tobacco-Free Kids, an anti-tobacco partnership. Studies have shown that raising taxes on cigarettes keeps a higher proportion of younger people from smoking.
Adventists continue to fight tobacco from a public policy standpoint as well, says Dr. Roy Branson, director for the Center for Law and Public Policy, a private group of Adventists in the legal and public policy fields, and an officer of the Interreligious Coalition for Smoking or Health. He says states raise a lot of revenue from tobacco taxes, although very little of it goes for anti-smoking campaigns.
“That, to me, is immoral,” says Branson. “You have a new source of revenue to fight smoking, but they’re using it for other things. Taxes should be raised to help fight smoking, not to balance the budget.”
Copyright © 2003 Adventist News Network.
