THE CIGARETTE HABIT
The widespread use of tobacco has given rise to an equally wide
discussion as to its effects on the human organism. Medical men are
divided into hostile camps by their diversity of opinion as to the
effects of nicotine on the adult. The subject has engaged the attention
of reformers, educators, physical directors, scientists and physicians
for many generations. Without attempting an exhaustive discussion of
the subject, the author quotes the following from Dr. Clouston, an
eminent English physician, as to the effect of tobacco upon the adult
male:
“The use of tobacco has become the rule rather than the exception
among the grown men of Europe and America and of some parts of Asia.
If its use is restricted to full-grown men, if only good tobacco is
used, not of too great strength, and if it is not used to excess, then
there are no scientific proofs that it has any injurious effects, if
there is no idiosyncrasy against it. Speaking generally, it exercises
a soothing influence when the nervous system is in any way irritable.
It tends to calm and continuous thinking, and in many men promotes
the digestion of food. To those good results there are, however,
exceptions. It sometimes sets up a very strong desire for its excessive
use; this often passing into a morbid craving which leads to excess and
hurt. Used in such excessive quantity tobacco acts injuriously on the
heart, weakens digestion, and causes congestion of the throat as well
as hindering mental action. In many people its use tends towards a
desire for alcohol as well. I have repeatedly seen persons of a nervous
temperament where the two excesses in tobacco and alcohol were linked
together. Tobacco, properly used, may, in some cases, undoubtedly be
made a mental hygienic.”
Notwithstanding the insufficient scientific data available as to the
results of nicotine on mature men, there is a strong belief on the
part of numerous physicians and others that its effect is deleterious.
There is no diversity of opinion, however, as to the injury wrought
by nicotine on the morals, mind, and body of the adolescent boy.
Authorities who have given the subject exhaustive investigation
and careful thought are unanimous in their conclusions that the
use of tobacco in any form before maturity is injurious. Physical
deterioration as a result of tobacco and especially of cigarettes
has been conclusively demonstrated by measurements and tests of
large numbers of young men in colleges, which show beyond question
that physical growth is stunted; lung capacity, without which an
athlete cannot achieve distinction, is lessened; the nervous system is
irritated and the heart action is depressed. The lungs are rendered
susceptible to pulmonary and tubercular infection and the mental
development of the boy receives a serious check. Such physical and
mental influences cannot fail in producing moral defects as well.
Dr. George L. Meylan of Columbia University has compiled some
interesting data from his observations of a large number of college
students covering the three and one-half or four years of their
undergraduate life at age approximately of seventeen to twenty at
entrance and twenty-one to twenty-four at graduation. The following
instructive table prepared by him shows the age when smokers acquired
the habit:
+---------------------------------------------+
| Age | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 |
+--------+---+---+---+----+----+----+----+----+
| Number | 1 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 11 |
+---------------------------------------------+
+---------------------------------------------+
| Age | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 |
+----------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+
| Number | 11 | 18 | 30 | 23 | 16 | 0 | 1 |
+---------------------------------------------+
It will be observed that the largest number of boys contracted the
habit at age seventeen, with ages sixteen and eighteen next in point of
numbers. Few boys of the one hundred and fifteen observed in the above
table began the habit before the fourteenth year, the age near which
adolescence begins. Dr. Meylan reached the following conclusions based
on many years of medical examination of boys and young men and his
experience in teaching hygiene:
“1. All scientists are agreed that the use of tobacco by adolescents is
injurious; parents, teachers, and physicians should strive earnestly to
warn youths against its use.
“2. There is no scientific evidence that the moderate use of tobacco
by healthy mature men produces any beneficial or injurious physical
effects that can be measured.
“3. There is an abundance of evidence that tobacco produces injurious
effects on (a) certain individuals suffering from various nervous
affections; (b) persons with an idiosyncrasy against tobacco; (c) all
persons who use it excessively.
“4. It has been shown conclusively in this study and also by Mr. Clarke
that the use of tobacco by college students is closely associated with
idleness, lack of ambition, lack of application and low scholarship.”
Dr. Jay W. Seaver of Yale University has expressed the following
opinion as the result of his examination of thousands of university
students:
“The effect of nicotine on the growth is very measurable, and the
following figures are presented as a fairly satisfactory demonstration
of the extent of the interference with growth that may be expected in
boys from sixteen to twenty-five years of age, when they are believed
to have reached full maturity. For purposes of comparison the men
composing a class in Yale have been divided into three groups. The
first is made up of those who do not use tobacco in any form; the
second consists of those who have used tobacco for at least a year of
the college course; the third group includes the irregular users. A
compilation of the anthropometric data on this basis shows that during
the period of undergraduate life, which is essentially three and a half
years, the first group grows in weight 10.4 per cent. more than the
second, and 6.6 per cent. more than the third; in girth of chest the
first group grows 26.7 per cent. more than the second, and 23 per cent,
more than the third; in capacity of lungs the first group gains 77.5
per cent. more than the second, and 49.5 per cent. more than the third.”
The figures quoted above furnish a powerful and convincing argument
against the use of tobacco in any form by the person who has not
attained maturity. The cigarette is generally considered the most
pernicious form in which tobacco can be used and this is the form in
which boys generally begin its use. Both before and after puberty
the boy is imitative of his elders. “The boy apes the man” and the
desire to appear “manly” in the eyes of his companions is one of the
strongest incentives to acquire the habit. As smoking is common among
men, he seeks to acquire this evidence of masculinity by adopting its
semblance. It possesses an insidious attraction in its daintiness and
apparent harmlessness. The phenomenon of combustion, the ascending
ribbon of smoke which vanishes to nothingness, the cohesiveness of
the ash, the experiment of blowing smoke rings in the air and the
curiosity to learn the effect of smoking on the individual, all are
powerful incitements to the inquisitive mind of a boy. The cigarette
habit is usually contracted during the period of adolescence, or even
earlier, when the organs, glands, tissues, and muscles of his body
are in a formative stage of development. It requires no corroboration
from medical experts to convince the man of average intelligence that
such a powerful narcotic as nicotine cannot be beneficial to growth
under these conditions. Common sense as well as expert opinion join
in condemning the nicotine drug habit of children. You will find
nicotine classified in pharmacopœias as a drug whose effects are
somewhat similar to those of opium and morphine. From 3 to 8 per cent.
of tobacco is composed of nicotine, of which 50 to 60 per cent. is
inhaled in smoking, the remainder being consumed in combustion.
The use of tobacco in the cigar or the pipe is less objectionable
than in the cigarette for many reasons. It is the almost universal
custom of those addicted to the cigarette to inhale the smoke, which
is the exception with the pipe and cigar smoker. But nicotine is not
the only poison generated in the cigarette even where tobacco is not
combined with opium or other drugs used to contribute to its flavor
and aroma; the combustion of tobacco with the rice paper in which it
is rolled makes a compound which is neither tobacco smoke nor paper
smoke, but an alkaloid known as acrolein, “the name of which is known
to all scientists and the smell of which is known to everyone.” Another
injurious product of cigarette combustion is carbonic oxide. These two
products of the cigarette are far more virulent than tobacco smoke.
They enter the blood through the mucous membranes of the mouth,
throat, bronchial tubes, and lungs and act as powerful depressives on
the heart. Cigarette poisoning manifests itself in lung and throat
irritation, restlessness, nervousness, petulance, inability to
concentrate thought, and depression of the nervous system.
The effect is not only physical but moral. The keen sense of
discrimination between right and wrong is blunted and the finer moral
conceptions become obtused. The highest scholarship in our colleges and
universities is attained by men who are non-smokers. The famous college
athletes have a smaller proportion of smokers than those who have not
achieved distinction in athletics. If these facts are true of college
men approaching maturity, they will be still more apparent in younger
boys. Unfortunately, there has been no scientific investigation along
these lines among boys in our secondary schools. But the head of one
of our leading preparatory schools is authority for the statement
that tobacco is the bane of his school and that more boys break down
in health and are sent home from its influence than from any other.
A recognition of the evil results of cigarette smoking by minors is
crystallized in the enactment of laws in more than a dozen states
against selling cigarettes to minors, as well as making it an offense
for adolescents under specified ages to smoke cigarettes on the streets.
The records of juvenile and criminal courts disclose the fact that
the cigarette fiends furnish 90 per cent. of their young criminals.
Dr. George F. Butler of Chicago gives this testimony as to the moral
weakening of the boy from the cigarette habit: “In my work some years
ago at the Chicago police stations and later as county physician in
the detention hospital I found that almost without exception the young
criminal, dement or delinquent, was a cigarette fiend. I am forced to
believe that this habit has largely to do with these mental and moral
infirmities.”
The boy at the rear end of a lighted cigarette has little chance of
obtaining a position from a business man. Even the telltale yellowish
discoloration of the fingers and the cigarette stench of his breath
give sufficient warning for the employer to inform the applicant that
he is not wanted. It takes a strong body and a clear mind to succeed
in competitive business. The boy handicapped in the race of life by
the cigarette habit is in the same condition as the sprinter who is
hopelessly handicapped in a hundred-yard dash; neither has any chance
of winning. John V. Farwell, the Chicago merchant, is quoted as saying:
“I would as lief employ a boy who steals sheep as one who smokes
cigarettes. One is no more to be trusted than the other.” To the same
effect is this warning of a well-known English physician: “A boy who
early smokes is rarely known to make a man of much energy and character
and he generally lacks physical and mental as well as moral energy.”
This subject is big with importance for the boy’s future. It is one of
the great boy-problems and it should be discussed frankly by father
and son before puberty, soon after which period so many boys acquire
the habit. It may be difficult for the father, with a cigar in his
mouth, to persuade his son that tobacco is injurious, but whether the
father is a smoker or not, a thorough discussion of the subject in all
its aspects is sure to prove beneficial. As the boy at this age is in
the hero-worship period and as his heroes in early adolescence are
always athletes, an appeal to his innate longing to attain physical
perfection and athletic distinction will be found more potent than
the appeal for mental or moral perfection, although the latter should
not be neglected. The additional grounds of abstinence from motives
of personal purity and self-respect have their effect, although the
argument that he should not needlessly cause annoyance or discomfort
to others has little weight with a boy prior to the reflective period.
If such warning is given to the boy before he contracts the habit it
will usually prove effective. Some parents conclude their instruction
with the statement that the son, on attaining his physical maturity at
approximately twenty-four years of age--when the danger of nicotine
poisoning on the growing boy has passed--may then make his own decision
as to whether he will or will not smoke.
In conclusion a word of suggestion is offered as to the means which
should be employed with boys who have already contracted the habit.
Dr. H. Krebs of Chicago, Secretary of the Anti-Cigarette League, has
used in his practice a simple remedy for the cigarette habit which is
reputed to be of great effectiveness. Its base is the chemical reaction
of a weak solution of silver nitrate with nicotine, which creates an
intensely disagreeable taste in the mouth. After the smoker has rinsed
his mouth with this solution and draws in a whiff of cigarette smoke,
the chemical effect of the nicotine in combination with the solution
produces such a nauseating taste that further smoking for that day is
impossible. The treatment should be protracted until desire has waned
and will-power has become reëstablished.