Habits that Handicap: The Menace of Opium, Alcohol, and Tobacco, and the RemedyTowns, Charles Barnes
Science
Habits that Handicap: The Menace of Opium, Alcohol, and Tobacco, and the Remedy
Towns, Charles Barnes
Alcoholism; Opium abuse -- United States; Tobacco use
regular series.
The man predisposed to alcohol by the inheritance of a nervous temperament
will, if he uses tobacco at all, almost invariably use it to excess; and
this excess creates a restlessness for which alcohol is the natural
antidote. The experience of any type of man is that if he takes a drink
when he feels he has smoked too much, he finds he can at once begin
smoking all over again. For that reason, the two go together, and the
neurotic type of man too often combines the two. Tobacco thus develops the
necessity for alcohol.
It is very significant that in dealing with alcoholism no real reform can
be expected if the patient does not give up tobacco. Again, most men who
have ever used alcohol to excess, if restricted voluntarily or
involuntarily, will use tobacco to excess. This excess in tobacco produces
a narcotic effect which temporarily blunts the craving for alcohol.
Another way of saying the same thing is that when smokers are drunk they
no longer care to smoke, a fact that is a matter of common observation.
This means that there is a nervous condition produced alike by alcohol and
tobacco. When a man gets it from drinking, he does not keep on trying to
get it from smoking. As well as reacting upon each other, the two habits
keep each other going. It is not altogether by haphazard association that
saloons also sell cigars; they sell them for the same reason that they
give away pretzels--to make a man buy more drinks.
This relationship between tobacco and alcoholism is not understood by the
public. It has been absolutely demonstrated that the continued use of
tobacco is a tremendous handicap upon the man who is endeavoring to free
himself from the habit of alcoholic indulgence. Only a man of the
strongest character will persist in abstaining from alcohol unless he also
abstains from tobacco, even after he has undergone the most intelligent
medical treatment. In the system of a man already disposed toward
alcoholic stimulation, no one thing will prove so positive a factor toward
creating the sense of need as the use of tobacco. Physiological action of
tobacco is to create muscular (motor) unrest. Most habitual smokers
consume every day more than enough tobacco to carry them far beyond the
point where its stimulating effect ends and its narcotic effect begins.
Where this habitually occurs, the definitely toxic effect is notable, and
this results in a demand for that stimulation which the tobacco itself
once furnished, but now does not. Here is an evil effect of tobacco that
is rarely understood and almost never admitted.
OPIUM AND CIGARETTES IN CHINA
Current history affords us a striking proof of the closeness of the
relation between tobacco and opium.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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