p. 10 | The Question of Tobacco

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jun 28, 1906

The Question of Tobacco

Is the use of tobacco one of the things that helps the cause of Christ? Or is it a common accompaniment of much that retards the cause of Christ? Is any Christian man in genuine doubt on this point? If not, what is our simple duty?

Tobacco is used, and used freely and by great numbers, because it is a deadener of sensibilities. It helps to take the raw edge off life and feelings. It reduces brutal facts to pleasant seemings. The cold, hard world is not half so cold and hard when seen through the blue haze of tobacco smoke. Tobacco is comforting and soothing, not by bringing fresh strength to the physical system, but by numbing nerve and brain activity and rendering nerves and brain somewhat less conscious. At its worst, it produces nervous depression and prostration. At its best, in ordinary, “moderate” use, it acts as a narcotic; and a narcotic is that which “allays morbid susceptibility, relieving pain and producing sleep. In poisonous doses it [a narcotic] produces stupor, coma, and convulsions, and in still larger doses death.”

There come crisis times in a man’s physical life when the administering of a narcotic is the only way to save life; times when, to avert death, pain must be relieved and sensibility deadened. But is it well to bring one’s system, deliberately and voluntarily, into the condition when once or several times in every twenty-four hours the system cries out for deadening, so that the regular use of a narcotic is necessary for peace of body and mind? Is it well that the facts and difficulties of every-day life should seldom be seen in their reality, but mostly through the softening unreality of pleasant seeming? Is it well to be normal only when we are abnormal? Is any creature on earth more miserable than the habitual tobacco user who can not get at his tobacco?

The missing of an ordinary meal is not to be compared, in resulting discomfort, with the nervous strain of the omitted smoke. Yet food strengthens the body; and no tobacco user will claim that his body is built up by his habit.

Are such statements as these only the exaggerated indictments of an enemy of mankind’s friend the “weed”? As the editor was working on this issue of the Sunday School Times, a letter was laid on his desk which proved to be an appeal from a North Carolina tobacco company to forswear all other tobacco in favor of his own. The letter opened with the inviting sentence, “Do you know what a pipe dream is? Let us tell you.” But in the course of its argument there occurred several statements that are suggestive in a line that the tobacco company probably did not intend. In extolling the merits of a patented pipe, the company asserts, “and a pipe is the LEAST INJURIOUS [the capitals are as quoted] method of smoking.” Why not “most beneficial”?—Because even tobacco and pipe merchants know that tobacco using is injurious; therefore the phrase that unconsciously springs from their lips even when they want to praise their own wares is “least injurious.” They do not claim to offer nourishment, but minimized injury.

The North Carolina tobacco company goes on with other unconsciously damaging claims, such as that certain makes of pipes are undesirable because they become “saturated with poisonous nicotin;” “if the smoke does not strike the end of the tongue (one of the most sensitive centers of the nervous system), it is impossible to burn it,”—therefore with this patent pipe “no nicotin can reach the mouth to poison the system.” And a strong plea of this tobacco company is for “the contented feeling that steals over a well-fed man with a lighted pipe.” Is that a condition that a Christian worker wants to attain to more or less often during his waking hours every day? Does it tend to build up and strengthen one in the service of Him who said, “I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work”? Yet the circulars of this tobacco company contain a signed testimonial from a Massachusetts clergyman, asserting that he has been a smoker for forty years, and closing with the words, “You may count me as a permanent customer.”

“Permanent”! there is one fact in the tobacco question that ought to be fairly faced by every boy and young man who thinks at all over the matter of his personal habits. A business man’s sensible discussion of the tobacco habit puts the truth in this frank way:—

“When it comes, it comes to stay. Men rarely ever abandon it after the twenty-first year. Therefore take it for life, or quit it short. If you begin it, count that your final decision. . . . Anyhow, let us not drop into it by accident, or because some other fellow invites it, and then admit, as many a friend of mine has done, that we are caught in a trap of unbreakable habit.”

“If reason and will and manhood are going to have anything to do with deciding the matter, there are some things that must be thought of. They are the disadvantages. All admit that the habit, once formed, is a master. What kind of master is it?

“It is an unclean master. A clean mouth, sweet breath, untainted clothes, apartments free from stale odor, are hard things for a habitual smoker to manage. This point needs no elaboration. But if a proof is wanted, I only ask a glance at the floor of the smokers’ side of a ferry or the smoking car of a train, and a sniff of the atmosphere after a few minutes of the crowd’s unrestrained enjoyment of the weed, and—which is quite as significant—a note of the contrast in appearance between the men who crowd these places and those who seek cleaner floors and purer air.

“It is an unhealthy master. It corrupts the sense of taste, injures the stomach, deadens the sensibilities, causes cancers and heart troubles. I can count half a dozen personal friends at this moment who know, on physicians’ authority, that further continuance of smoking means shortened days, perhaps sudden death. Only one or two, however, have been strong enough to give it up.

“It is an almost immoral master. Not in itself a necessary evil, it nevertheless promotes certain associations and leads in certain directions as to other habits which are unhealthy to the moral nature. Do you know a liquor soaker who is not fond of tobacco? Did you ever see a barroom or prize-fighting or gambling crowd or rough gang of any kind that was not smoking and chewing? To paraphrase a famous remark by Horace Greeley, ‘All tobacco users are not horse thieves, but all horse thieves are tobacco users.’ A lad who has learned to handle a cigar with grace has made a first-class start on a road that has more than one bad stopping-place. If you think that is not so, let me ask you whether, if you were an employer, and wanted a young man for a position of trust and growth, you would select the one with a cigar in his mouth, or the one who had decided not to use it.

“It is a hard master. It is more powerful than your judgment and will combined. The old fable, ‘I can stop any time I want to,’ is disproved by the earnest attempts of many a strong man you and I know.”

There is nothing new in all these facts, to smokers. Indeed, many a user of tobacco

will say that some of them are not facts; that he has not been hurt by his habit, but that he compares favorably in health with the best of non-smokers. He fails to recognize that that point has not been proved or even tested, until, as happens to so many men, the question of his reserve power is the question that will turn the balance for him between life and death. Then it is that doctors say of a man, “But for his smoking, he would have pulled through;” or of another man, “If he had been a smoker, he could never have made this winning fight.”

Yet the real question, after all, is not whether one is willing to take his chances, as most men are, against ever having to depend for life upon one’s unimpaired reserve; rather it is, Has any follower of Christ the right to deaden, by an abnormal habit from which nature at first revolts, the keenness of any of his God-given faculties and powers of sensitiveness? Can one think of Jesus the man and the minister, whose bodily needs were identical with ours, finding relief after an exhausting Sabbath at Capernaum in the soothing effects of tobacco? Is that suggestion irreverent and unthinkable? Why? Why more so than for one who is striving to make of his body a living sacrifice for that same Christ? What of Paul? Would it be possible to conceive of his parchments as being saturated with tobacco smoke, while on them were written the words: “I buffet my body, and bring it into bondage;” “be ye imitators of me, even as I also am of Christ”?

There is a vigorous effort being made by some of the earnest Christian women of our land to improve the opportunity of the temperance lesson of this second quarter of the year for anti-cigarette teaching in the Sunday-school. Thousands of mothers and fathers and teachers will welcome this crusade; but there is one great difficulty in its way. One who is responsible for much of the sanest, most effectively directed temperance (which includes anti-tobacco) work that is blessing our land to-day, says: “If we have thousands and thousands of little boys smoking cigarettes, there is a cause for their having begun the practise. Searching for the main cause, it seems to me that the example of smoking men is the seed, whose natural harvest is our present crop of cigarette-smoking boys.” A prominent young Philadelphia physician who is striking vigorous blows for purity in American manhood writes: “Even though I myself was reared in a cloud of tobacco smoke, I must say with all candor that the clergyman and the physician appear to me to have less right than any other human being to injure and depress the powers loaned to them by the Almighty by the use of stimulants and narcotics in even the smallest quantities. If these drugs cause harm to others, and if influence is an indispensable feature of our daily lives, as we know it to be, then you and I can not explain away our responsibility if we openly or secretly submit ourselves to these allies of immorality. I again speak strictly as a physician, not as an enthusiast in the crusade against tobacco and alcohol as such.” Another sentence of such sort from the North Carolina tobacco company’s circulars reads, “It’s just as good for cigarette as for pipe.” Of course it is; and “if it’s good enough for my father or my pastor, it’s good enough for me,” says Young America.—Sunday School Times.