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
I believe that the evil effects of tobacco will be much more apparent in
the next generation than they are in this; for forty years ago, when I was
a boy, the lad who decided to begin to smoke knew nothing of cigarettes,
and had only the pipe and the cheap cigar to choose between, forms so
overpowering that they frequently discouraged him at the start. Thus many
were undoubtedly saved from the tobacco habit; but now, with mild
cigarettes upon the market, at very low prices, and in most States found
on sale in every candy store, the situation has perils undreamed of at
that earlier period. It is noteworthy that cigarettes are "doped"
expressly to allay nausea, which is the normal effect of tobacco-smoking
upon the uninured human system, and at the same time to quiet that motor
unrest which is the first symptom to follow the introduction of nicotine
into the human system. The narcotic effect of the adulterant drugs is
therefore to ease the smoker's first pang and to make him more quickly the
victim of the tobacco habit.
The smoker of cigarettes gets his narcotic by precisely the same
mechanical process through which the opium-smoker gets his. The
opium-smoker would find it far too long and expensive a process to obtain
the desired effect from opium by taking it into his stomach; but by
burning a very much smaller quantity of the drug and bringing it into
contact with the sensitive absorbent tissues of the throat and nose, he
obtains the narcotic effect that his system craves.
THE USE OF TOBACCO DESTROYS MORAL DISCIPLINE
I am convinced that the use of cigarettes is responsible for the undoing
of seventy-five per cent. of the boys who go wrong. Few boys wait until
they are mature and their resistance is at its maximum before they begin
the use of tobacco. It would be remarkable if they did wait, for their
fathers and their older brothers are constantly blowing smoke into their
faces. Even where restrictive laws exist, minors find no difficulty in
obtaining cigarettes, so that children of the age that is most easily
harmed by the use of tobacco now habitually indulge in its most harmful
form.
There is another unfortunate effect of the use of tobacco by boys. When
they begin to smoke, they do so against the wishes and usually against the
orders of their parents. This means broken discipline and deception. The
boy who endeavors to conceal the fact that he smokes is started along a
path that is even more harmful than tobacco. He has to invent excuses for
being absent from home, and to explain away the odor of tobacco that is
sure to cling to him; and when a boy begins to lie about these things, he
will lie about others. So far as truth goes, the bars are down.
Furthermore, he has to spend more money. Unless he is one of those
unfortunate youths who are not held to a moderate weekly allowance, too
often he will resort to dishonest means to obtain the money to satisfy his
newly acquired taste.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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