Great American Smoke-Out

This is the 34th annual “Great American Smoke-Out”, a day set aside each year, to discourage the smoking of tobacco (note the liberal press never mentions the smoking of marijuana). After a lifetime of studying tobacco, smoking, dipping, chewing, and every other way of using the tobacco plant product, I can say to you without fear of contradiction, those who use these products are well aware of their harm. It has been a long time since any male, working for me, smoked, but every female who has ever worked for me, with one exception, smoked cigarettes, they tell me they are liberated women. Just as they realize the foolishness of putting other poisons into their systems, just as they realize the foolishness of a walking in front of a speeding vehicle, just as they realize the foolishness of electrocuting or burning themselves alive...they know about the toxicity of tobacco products. I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live (Deuteronomy 30:19)

Just as it does not take a physician, pastor, poet or prophet to tell any person with a brain that they are going to die, and after that, the judgment, so anyone knows who puts poison into the body, that there are consequences for the act. Lets face it, God gave to his chief creation free will; we have free will to overeat, free will to eat non-nutritious foods, free will to drink poisonous, addictive alcohol. We have free will to put into our body by needle, throat, nose, etc. addictive substances which will destroy our brain and body.

Early in my practice, I discovered that most patients will not follow instructions, I have learned through a long life, that most human beings give little thought about their eternal security, even little thought about their present security, they just don't care. There was a time that I would jump on any white horse trying to save humanity from themselves. We can give the message: medical, ethical, business, political, it is up to God to do the rest.

So it is with the smoking of cigarettes, what human being, blessed with any intelligence at all, thinks he can burn a poison in his mouth, suck the toxins into his system through the mouth and nose, and think that it will not eventually have a devastating effect. It won't happen overnight, many will inhale/swallow/salivate tobacco over many years...particularly chewing tobacco, without it having any obvious effect. In rat poison, most is just corn meal, it is the small amount of arsenic that does the job. In our toothpaste, drinking water, it is the long-time effectiveness of chloride and fluoride that does the job. In food intake, everything enhanced by fructose and sodium, it is these addictive substance which ultimately do the job.

Like many of the other millions of eastern North Carolina natives, I was born and raised in the poverty of the tobacco-producing culture. Not quite as decadent as Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road, it takes one who was there to describe it. The baby-boomers and Yankees who have invaded Eastern North Carolina, buying up the former crop land for housing communities, cannot imagine what it was like just 50-100 years ago: dirt road after dirt road of small farms, patches of growing tobacco, along with the cotton, corn and other cash crops. Tobacco curing barns were everywhere, late summer, as you drove through this “world”, you could smell the curing tobacco, it smelled like money.

We owned what would have been called a large farm, we had 10 acres of tobacco. The entire tobacco process was built around poisons (I understand much has changed during the past 50 years, since I last saw or witnessed this agriculture). I remember my father put poison into the very ground of the plant beds which he seeded in order to grow the plants to be transplanted into rows in the fields. From the time the seeds made their appearance as plants, there was a system of poisoning against “blue mold” and insects. I remember that in transplanting the plants into tobacco field rows, the roots were dipped into poison to keep worms away from the root, the plants would usually grow about six feet high, continuous poisoning to keep insects and worms from eating the leaves (everything is addicted to tobacco, and when not addicted enough, the manufacturer adds more poisonous nicotine).

Then, the mature plant was harvested, put into curing barns where all this poison on the gummy stomata were thoroughly baked into the leaves, totally dry (the tobacco leaves would rot if not dried). The harvesting process was something that most people my age will never forget; the heat of tobacco field, cropping the riping leaves, hauling them by trucks (small trucks pulled by mules) to the tobacco curing barns where the leaves were “strung” onto sticks for hanging into the curing barns.

As a child, I can remember working all day long in this green tobacco to make one dollar. Children in the community tried to work everyday because this money was used for their school expenses. The mothers and adults used this money for their Christmas shopping, and from these many years of tobacco growing, field, barn, grading, auction, my own father sent his four children through college.

Those in this “tobacco land” who made the most money, were the large tobacco warehouse men where millions of pounds of the “weed“ were auctioned. Those of you who remember Bill Stern's sportscast, every night, remember the sounds of the tobacco auctioneer, cigarette companies bought these millions of pounds of tobacco to be made into tobacco products, mostly cigarettes. It was the American tobacco company, Rentals Company, Duke Company, Liggett and Myers, Philip Morris and other well-known names, putting out such famous brands as Camels, Old Gold, Moore, Chesterfields, Benson and Hedges, Kool, etc. Brands and companies, which, as my father said, “people got rich off of a fool's mistake.”

The preacher in eastern North Carolina could preach against all sin except the sin of raising tobacco and smoking, this was off-limits. There is one baptist denomination, a denomination to which I have been very generous, mostly located in eastern North Carolina who has expressed its disdain for me because I have preached against “evil tobacco”, evil alcohol, evil lottery. These folks have never seen the autopsy lungs of a smoker. At least, “God moves in mysterious ways.” The Dukes and Rentals families who made such hideous fortunes from tobacco, have given back via Duke University, Wake Forest University, Duke Hospital and Wake Forest Hospital.

So, the tobacco growing and tobacco industries were chased out of America into foreign countries. Tobacco grows well in communist China, I have seen such large growing fields there, such large cigarette manufacturing companies there. 66% of all Chinese men smoke cigarettes, and so it is around the world. Perhaps the politically-correct, state-controlled, academic prostitutes, corrupt politicians, all singing in chorus will be happy when all sin products...tobacco, alcohol, sweets, heroin and such for Big Pharma, are all grown in other places, and since 91% of Walmart's sales products come from other places, we can buy everything there.

Do you remember window shopping? Stores up and down American streets with windows showing attractively what was inside the store. In China, Russia, stores like warehouses, goods just piled on tables. We have sown to the wind, and we have reaped a whirlwind. (Hosea 8:7)