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SMOKE ON THE SILVER SCREEN

We’ve had a fairly cheerful time in this new radio series, exploring ways we can all grab hold of what’s promised in our featured book: Live 10 Healthy Years Longer. But today all of us in the studio are just a little bit cranky, seeing red, so to speak. And it’s because of a recent L.A. Times newspaper story that happened to float into our offices.

Actually, it blew in on a cloud of smoke. Benedict Carey, who writes for the Times’ weekly Health section, had a story with this title: “Cigarettes Are Doing Big Box Office.” The general gist is that, even with all the restrictions on smoking and tobacco ads, cigarettes still occupy a primo spot . . .

“ . . . in California’s most glamorous venue — the movies, where actors are posing with brand-name cigarettes more frequently now than they have in decades, according to a new study.”

Tobacco companies swear that for the past 12 years they have voluntarily pledged to NOT participate in so-called “product placement,” where money changes hands in return for a movie featuring their certain brand. But for some mysterious reason — according to this study done by Dartmouth Medical School — there’s just as much smoking on the screen as there was before the ban went into effect. And here’s the part that really frustrates us: scenes where a popular actor visibly lights up an identifiable brand have had a tenfold jump. That’s right — they went from 1% of films before the ban to 11% today. And Carey points out that when a popular actor like Bruce Willis or Julia Roberts lights up their favorite brand name right there in the movie and blows smoke out over the audience, that’s an almost irresistible advertisement for young people watching the movie. It’s the most deadly kind of come-on there is.

Of course, studio executives protest that sometimes the realism of a film demands that they show a person smoking. But it’s hard to find that logic compelling, isn’t it? When Jack Dawson, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, was lounging on that deckside bench, looking up at the moonlit sky, moments before the dramatic scene where he rescues Rose from jumping off the Titanic, what’s he doing? Smoking a cigarette and blowing the smoke into the cold night air. What does the smoking have to do with the scene? Nothing. What does it add to the scene? Nothing. What does it accomplish besides getting 3,000 teenagers a day, every single day of the year, to start smoking cigarettes for the first time? Not a whole lot that we can think of.

The authors of this book, Jan Kuzma and Cecil Murphey, express their outrage with a bit different metaphor. Maybe you’ve heard this one before:

“Five days ago, three jumbo jets crashed in California,” they ask us to imagine. “More than a thousand people died in the separate crashes. Four days ago, three more planes crashed outside Miami. Everyone on board each plane died. Three days ago, a plane crashed in Denver, another in Boston, and one in Atlanta. In each crash, everyone on board died. Yesterday another thousand people died in airline crashes. So far today, two planes have crashed. In the five days alone, the average daily death count has been one thousand people.”

And now they pose the question: What would be happening in our world if three jumbo jets did indeed plunge to earth every single day? It would be panic time at CNN. It would be wall-to-wall news coverage. It would be the lead headline of every newspaper, magazine, TV talk show, and network broadcast. Congress would be in a screaming session this very minute, with the FAA and the heads of every airline, and they’d be hammering out legislation — gridlock or no gridlock, TO GET THIS THING FIXED!!

By the way, would anybody be flying on planes? Not if you could help it. You’d be riding on the bus or e-mailing your business across the country instead of flying it there.

Well, the fact is this: Every single day, just in the U.S. alone, three planeloads of smokers go down to premature deaths. A thousand people every single day die of tobacco-related illnesses.

“Cigarettes kill more Americans annually,” write Jan and Cecil, “than AIDS, cocaine, heroin, alcohol, automobiles, homicide, suicide, and fire . . . combined! COMBINED!”

Friend, that is unbelievable. And if you think 747 jumbo jets are expensive to replace, we find out that cigarettes, along with alcohol and drugs, are going to cost Medicare — which we all help pay for — one trillion dollars in the next two decades.

Well, let’s not burn up our few minutes with disease statistics, friend, because I think you already know them. The good news is this. Even if you’re a smoker this very minute, you can get OFF that jumbo jet and join the Live-Longer Lifestyle. Believe me, the 27,000 people in that health study who have been living eight, ten, 13 years longer than the general population . . . NONE of them are smokers! Not a one of them. And if you stop right now – throw those cigarettes away and never pick them up again – your body immediately begins to heal itself. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, who created that jumbo jet metaphor, had this to say in his 1990 report to the nation:

“Smoking cessation represents the single most important step that smokers can take to enhance the length and quality of their lives.”

I heard an apocryphal story once about a discussion between a smoker and a nonsmoker. “I don’t smoke,” the nonsmoker proudly told his tobacco-saturated friend. And the guy with the cigarette asked him: “What would you do if your doctor told you you were going to die in six months if you didn’t quit smoking?” “I just told you,” the other man said. “I don’t smoke!” “See!” his friend shouted. “You have nothing in reserve!”

Well, that’s kind of cute, but the amazing news if you ARE a smoker is that if you quit today, right now, the damage which has been done up till now is incredibly reversible. In fact, Jan and Cecil tell us that after 15 years of nonsmoking, it’s essentially as though you never had smoked. Unless you already had cancer or heart disease when you quit, your risk of death, your mortality statistics, will be those of a lifelong nonsmoker. So you should never say: “It’s too late. I’ve gone too far.” You can recover a very good share of the lost years, starting right now.

Besides the long, long list of health advantages — and we all know them — our textbook for this series takes us through the other benefits we can have as nonsmokers. We save buckets of money: not only on cigarettes, of course, but also less money for cold remedies, health care, and life insurance. You lose fewer days to sickness. And just in case you’re interested, you’re 50% less likely to suffer from impotence if you’re a nonsmoker. So instead of buying blue pills for yourself, you can buy red roses for your wife with the money you save.

Well, friend, if you’re a smoker, let me say this to you. It’s probably not something you can fix over the radio. Certainly you should get counsel from your family doctor. It might take the aid of something like a nicotine patch. Jan and Cecil report on the phenomenal success many people are having with something called Bupropion — the brand name is Zyban, by the way — which is a breakthrough partly engineered by a Dr. Linda Hyde Ferry of . . . guess where? Loma Linda University — the very site of most of these Live-Longer Lifestyle health studies. Bupropion is the first FDA-approved, nonaddicting medication to help a person with smoking cessation. And you might well need something along these lines.

But two points as we close. Jan Kuzma and Cecil Murphey, right in this book, share 12 marvelous, practical things a smoker can do starting right now, Thursday, January 13, 2005, to get off that jumbo jet. Health tips, strategy tips, spiritual tips, exercise tips. Many, many people have successfully kicked the cigarette habit, and there’s not a reason in the world why you can’t do it too. By all means, if you haven’t yet called or written in for your copy of this book, Live 10 Healthy Years Longer, contact us today. This chapter alone, entitled “A Stop In Time,” could be an incredible course correction for you. We would love for that to happen in your life.

And my second point is this. Friend, I can tell you without any hesitation that it’s the Lord’s will for you to be free of your cigarette habit. I know it! The Bible assures us in powerful, comforting, hope-filled words that He wants us to be healthy! That’s Third John, verse two. He’ll provide you with the resources to gain victory. That’s in Philippians four. He wants you to enjoy the abundant life — that’s John 10:10 . . . and Jesus Himself saying that. And there’s no way in the world that smoking, with all its attending horrors, is an abundant life. No way. I don’t care how good it looks when Bruce Willis lights up. That’s a sad, sorry lie . . . and you and I both know it.

So on the one hand we have tobacco companies. They’d like to keep you smoking. They want you to smoke. They invite you to smoke, and their invitations are pretty powerful. Across the way, on the other side of the cemetery . . . is God. Offering abundant life, both now and in His eternal kingdom. Who’s more powerful? And whose friendship would you rather have?