By Christina Duff
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

NABILA, Fiji Tobacco ads clutter the dirt roads on these
volcanopeaked islands, and nearly everyone strolling the
sugarcane fields carries a cigarette.
Everyone, that is, except the tall, graceful natives of Nabila.
Their village alone kicked the habit, and they didn't need gum,
patches or even lawyers.
Instead, they have the tobacco taboo.
In this land where men wear sulus, or skirts, and people tell
time by the sun, taboos aren't uncommon. But this one has
lasted six years. Conjured up with great ceremony by Nabilan
elders and sealed with the hallucinogenic cocktail known as
kava, it has been reinforced by very real fears of bad luck and
illness, and by a quirky group of surfing M.D.s who had tried
more conventional ways to get villagers to stop smoking.
It all began 10 years ago, when the doctors met on the tiny
Fijian island of Tavarua for a firstofitskind medical
conference. They spent days riding 20foot waves, nights
discussing head trauma known as "shakensurfers syndrome."
"The surf was unreal, the exchange of ideas hot," says Mark
Renneker, a family practitioner and surfer from San Francisco.
It was the birth of the Surfer's Medical Association, which over
time grew to 600 members worldwide. Their motto: "Let's go
surfing and then heal some people."
Each year, the waveriding doctors returned to this resort
island, drawn by beaches so blessedly free of rocks that some
docs surfed naked, and by friendships with residents of the
nearby village of Nabila, who worked in guest lodges, cleaning
rooms and serving drinks.
During offwave hours, the doctors traded their boards for
medical bags and motorboated home with the Nabilans. They
carried their stethoscopes miles down a rugged dirt road to the
small village where pigs roam freely and children run barefoot.
They were totally bummed by what they found. Cigarette butts
stained the lush green grounds. A third of the village's 353
people suffered hypertension, asthma and vascular diseases.
Without television or telephones, nothing passed the warm
hours in the thatchedroofed, singleroom homes better than a
long nicotine drag.
"There were bloody long lines of people needing to see us,
smoking while they waited," recalls Simon Leslie, an Australian
doctor who was among the first to visit the village.
Nabila was hardly an exception. The World Health
Organization says six of 10 men and three of 10 women in Fiji
smoke, ranking it up there with Russia and Poland in terms of
per capita cigarette consumption.
The surfing doctors put their bleached heads together. They
tacked bright American Cancer Society posters on the people's
bamboo walls. They convinced the village preacher, Sam
Kadranevu, to stop smoking and made him a village scold. Mr.
Kadranevu would bellow to his people that tobacco was "the
devil."
Nothing worked. Then one day in 1990, when the surfers were
away, the village elders turned to divine intervention, recalls
Sakiusa Nadruku, chief of the province that includes Nabila.
Residents collected all the cigarettes in the village, lit them up
and sucked them, one by one, to butts. Swaying with nausea,
they eased down on mats and began passing a coconut shell
holding kava, a sacred Fijian potion. Made from a powdered
root, the drink resembles muddy water, tastes of celery and, if
enough of it is drunk, packs a mild high. The villagers knocked
this back for six hours, their dark eyes glazing.
It is said that the evil spirits of cigarettes were drawn into the
last drops of kava. The elders hurled the sacred potion to the
ground. Thus began a tobacco taboo to forever kill the desire to
vakatavako, or smoke. Quick as you can say Nicorette, the
Nabilans went cold turkey.
(END) DOW JONES NEWS 051997
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Copyright 1997