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
The social standing of the man who took it from the tepees of the North
American Indians to England is mainly responsible for its taking root
there, for the acquisition of the tobacco habit is a painful process.
Nature's revolt against it is much more instinctive than her revolt
against alcohol. Furthermore, like any other form of poison, its effects
are most immediate and evident upon the young and weak; for they are
easier to poison than the mature and strong.
THE FULL EFFECT OF THE TOBACCO HABIT IS NOT YET APPARENT
To one who has made a careful study of the effects of tobacco the prospect
for the future is not encouraging. The habit was already widespread before
the extensive manufacture, or even knowledge, of cigarettes was introduced
into the United States, and this later form of smoking, which is easily
the most obnoxious and harmful of all, has not yet had time to disclose
its full power for injury. For it is in the inhaling of tobacco that the
smoker receives his greatest injury, and the habit of inhalation is
peculiar to the cigarette-smoker. While there are smokers of cigars and
pipes who inhale their smoke, it will almost always be found upon
investigation that they acquired the habit of inhalation through smoking
cigarettes. The average man with a cigarette history gets no pleasure out
of smoke which he does not inhale.
Even if a cigarette is made of the best tobacco, undrugged, and wrapped in
the purest of rice-paper, the mere fact that the smoke is almost
invariably inhaled suffices to make cigarette-smoking the most harmful
form of the tobacco habit. Inhalation is harmful because it not only
exposes the absorbent tissues of the mouth and upper throat to the smoke,
but thrusts the smoke throughout the throat, lungs, and nose, all of which
are lined with a specially sensitive membrane of great absorptive
capacity. Thus from the smoke of the cigarette the system takes up many
times as much poison as it takes up from the uninhaled smoke of the pipe
or cigar. Indeed, it may be added that the purer and higher the grade of
the tobacco, the more harmful it is to the smoker, for the more will it
tempt him into inhalation. Another danger of certain brands of cigarettes,
principally the costly imported and specially flavored brands, is that to
the extraordinary dangers of nicotine-poisoning found in all cigarettes
are added in these higher grades the perils of their flavoring materials,
from which even so dangerous a drug as opium is not always absent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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