Consider, for example, the amount of money which the wage slaves of the
world spend upon tobacco. Suppose they could be persuaded for two or
three years to spend this amount upon good reading matter--do you not
think there would be an improvement in their condition? Surely you
cannot maintain that the use of tobacco is necessary to the activities
of the brain! Surely you do not think that a man has to have a cigarette
in order to stimulate his thoughts, or to smoke a pipe to rest himself
after his work is done! I offer myself as evidence in such a
controversy; I have written as many books as any man in the radical
movement, and the sum total of my lifetime smoking amounts to one-half
of one cigarette. I tried that when I was eight years old, and somebody
told me a policeman would arrest me if he caught me, and I threw away
the cigarette, and ran and hid in an alley, and have not yet got over my
scare.
In the "Journal for Industrial Hygiene" for October, 1920, is an article
entitled "Fatigue and Efficiency of Smokers in a Strenuous Mental
Occupation." Experiments were conducted among telegraph operators, and
the result showed that "the heavy smokers of the group show a higher
output rate at the beginning of the day than the light smokers, but
their rate falls off more markedly in the late hours, and their
production for the whole day is definitely less than that of the light
smokers. The heavy smokers also show less ability than the light smokers
to respond to increasing pressure of work in the late hours of the day
by handling their full share of the work presented."
One point upon which every medical authority agrees is--that the use of
nicotine is of deadly effect upon the immature organism. Half-grown
youths who smoke cigarettes will never be full-sized men; they will
never have normal lungs or a normal heart. And likewise, all authorities
agree about the effect of smoking upon the organism of women. I gave
what little help I could to the task of helping to set women free, and
to make them the equals of men; but I was always pained when I
discovered that some of my feminist friends understood by woman's
emancipation no more than her right to adopt men's vices. I would say to
these ardent young female radicals, who cultivate the art of dangling a
cigarette from their lower lip, and sip cocktails out of coffee-cups in
Greenwich Village cafes, that they will never be able to bear sound
children; but I know that this would not interest them--they don't want
to bear any children at all. So I say that they will never be able to
think straight thoughts, and will be nervous invalids when they are
thirty.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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