Traditional Bans on Tobacco Find a New Relevance : Health: The 19th-Century doctrines of Mormons and Seventh-day Adventists put them at forefront of anti-smoking efforts.

More than a century and a half ago, Mormon Church founder Joseph Smith said God warned him that tobacco was harmful to human beings.

Smith’s 1833 revelation--in which alcohol, tea and coffee were also denounced--surprised many followers, some of whom tried unsuccessfully to give up tobacco when they were told it was against God’s will.

But the legacy of Smith exerts a profound influence. The Mormon Church is in the forefront of an aggressive campaign to educate against tobacco use.

In the face of the surgeon general’s accusations against the tobacco industry and the public’s growing disenchantment with smoking, Smith seems like a genuine prophet on at least one important health issue.

Utah, which is 66% Mormon, consistently has one of the lowest tobacco-use rates in the United States.

However, Mormons were not the only ones ahead of the curve in the holy war against tobacco. Ellen G. White, founder of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, wrote about the dangers of secondhand smoke as early as 1851.

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According to Stoy Proctor, associate director for the health and temperance department of the General Conference of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, White first spoke publicly of the harmful effects in 1848.

More than 30 years ago, in 1959, the Seventh-day Adventists introduced the nation’s earliest stop-smoking program, according to Proctor, who also serves as executive director of the “Breathe Free Plan to Stop Smoking.”

That five-day plan was the predecessor of “Breathe Free,” the program to stop smoking that was updated last year by the School of Public Health at Loma Linda University, a Seventh-day Adventist school.

Today, “Breathe Free” receives governmental endorsement in many countries, including China, Taiwan, Poland, Hungary and Germany. Its program includes nine sessions over a four-week period.

Sixty-five percent of “Breathe Free” participants are still not smoking a year after taking the program, Proctor said.

For members of the Mormon Church, known formally as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Smith’s revelation regarding tobacco and alcohol is referred to as the Word of Wisdom.

Richard E. Turley Jr., managing director of the church’s historical department in Salt Lake City, said the prophecy was not followed as strictly in the early years as it is today.

“In this century, the Word of Wisdom has been promoted with considerable vigor and has become in many ways one of the characteristics for which Latter-day Saints are known,” Turley said.

In April, the Coalition on Smoking and Health, a group with representatives from the American Lung Assn. and American Cancer Society, identified Utah as one of the nation’s five most successful states at implementing tobacco control laws, along with Nebraska, Minnesota, Hawaii and New York.

Utah prohibits free distribution of cigarettes and is the only state that bans any form of tobacco advertising, according to the coalition.

The coalition also honored a Mormon public service radio series titled “Time and Seasons” for raising public awareness about the dangers of tobacco use.

“Time and Seasons” follows a 30-minute format and is aired on more than 800 U.S. stations.

Gerry Pond, the series’ executive producer, says the program explores a broad range of moral issues on topics such as religious tolerance, the nurturing father, pornography and violence.

Pond said the programs steer clear of proselytizing and instead are “an educational effort using experts from various faiths to get the general public interested in topics that are socially and morally relevant.”

Requests for a free transcript of a church series on smoking among teen-agers have been second only to those for a series produced years ago on facing death, Pond said.

“All churches have a responsibility to deal with these real issues,” Pond said. “We can go to church and learn about nice Gospel stories, but if the churches don’t take seriously moral and social issues like teen-age tobacco use, who will do it?”

National statistics demonstrate the success Mormons have had in tackling teen-age smoking.

Stephen Bahr, professor of sociology at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, has for years been tracking the behavior of Utah teen-agers and comparing them to national averages.

Bahr identifies the Word of Wisdom and the church’s strong youth programs as two major reasons Utah youths typically show lower rates of consumption of alcohol and tobacco when compared to those in other states.

Asked in a survey if they had consumed alcohol in the last 30 days, 34.5% of Utah teen-agers said they had, compared to 60% in the United States as a whole, according to a Bahr analysis.