TOBACCO AND THE FUTURE OF THE RACE
Never yet has tobacco done any good to a man. Its direct effect has been
harmful to millions, and indirectly it has harmed many other millions by
setting up a systematic demand for stimulants. Of all the widely used
products of nature, tobacco finds the least excuse in real necessity.
Virtually the only medical use to which the active principle of tobacco
(nicotine) can be put is the production of nausea, and there are many
other drugs that can be used with much better effect for that purpose. If
one will study the pharmacopoeia, he will find that, next to prussic
acid, nicotine is rated as the most powerful known poison, and is not
credited with a single curative property. From a medical point of view it
is valueless.
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.
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.
And that is not all. Boys who spend their time in smoking go where they
will find other lads also engaged in the forbidden habit. They find
congenial groups in pool-rooms, where they learn to gamble, and in the
back rooms of saloons, where they learn to drink. The step from the
pool-room or the saloon to other gambling-places and to drinking-places
frequented by the unworthy of both sexes is an easy one. Thus the boy
whose first wrong-doing was the smoking of cigarettes against the wishes
of his parents soon becomes the target for all manner of immoral
influences.
In these days of advanced sociological study, when the mind of the world
is set upon efficiency, it is astonishing that so little attention has
been given to the effect of tobacco upon the young. To mankind at the
present time nothing in the world is so important as the conservation of
the boy. Humanity might well make any sacrifice conceivable in order to
keep its boys clean. Keeping boys clean means keeping girls clean, and
whatever keeps boys and girls clean purifies humanity as a whole. In other
words, the boy is the most important thing in the world, and his
cleanliness the most vital issue. Setting aside entirely the deleterious
effect of nicotine upon his physical system, early smoking, which usually
means the cigarette, is the most harmful single influence that is at
present working against his welfare. We can appreciate the terrific total
harm which tobacco does to youth, however, only when we add the
psychological harm and the physical harm together. Everything considered,
the question is an appalling one.
THE TEMPTATION TO USE TOBACCO
It is impossible to blame most boys very severely for yielding to the
smoke-temptation; therefore it becomes a difficult matter to blame them
for the wrong-doing which tends to follow it. Their error is only the
continuation of a similar error that their fathers have made before them
and now tacitly encourage. It is difficult to make any lad believe that he
need not be a fool because his father is one. Yet in most cases to save a
boy from the demonstrable ills of tobacco-using entails just this course
of reasoning. Orators and essayists from the beginning of time have found
a stumbling-block in preaching to their followers virtues they admire and
value, but do not themselves possess. The father who forbids his son to
smoke because it is harmful and expensive, while his own person reeks with
it, is not likely to impress the lad very vividly with either the force or
the honesty of his argument. More than one parent has found himself
abashed in such circumstances by a son with logic and intelligence. For
such a parent there is only one really honest course--to admit to his son
that he himself has been a fool, but that he does not wish his son to
follow in his footsteps.
THE NECESSITY OF EDUCATION CONCERNING THE DANGER OF TOBACCO
There is no question in my mind that this matter of tobacco should be made
the basis of a very thorough educational campaign among the youth of the
United States. The shocking spread of the tobacco habit among the women of
American cities indicates, moreover, need for extending this instruction
to girls as well.
If cleanliness of body is next to godliness, then cleanliness of mind is
godliness, and cleanliness of mind, real cleanliness, is impossible while
ignorance exists. Nothing in education is more generally neglected than
the enlightenment of the young--an enlightenment which can come only from
the mouths of elders who are themselves clean--as to the deadly nature of
alcohol, habit-forming drugs, and tobacco. I should very much dislike to
send a young and impressionable son for instruction in any subject to any
teacher, male or female, who used cigarettes. Thousands upon thousands of
parents in this country feel as I do on this subject; but while they
realize the danger which might result from the influence of a teacher who
smokes, they utterly neglect the far more dangerous and powerful influence
of a father who smokes. To my mind, however, it is essential that parents
should seriously consider the personal character of the men to whom they
intrust the education of their boys.
But the use of tobacco reaches far beyond the home circle and the schools
and even pollutes the atmosphere of the church itself. There are few
clergymen in the United States who do not use tobacco, and so a clean
father who rears a clean son is under the tragic necessity of urging his
attendance at a dirty church, and later on sending him to be a student in
a dirty college, for the simple reason that there are no clean ones.
Society seems to have been viciously organized for the destruction of the
boy, in whom lies its chief hope of preservation and improvement. The boy
who keeps clean does so against tremendous odds, to which frequently his
father, his school-teacher, and his clergyman are the chief contributors.
A dozen times during every day of his life he is subjected to the third
degree of temptation, and twice out of three times this ordeal is thrust
upon him by the very persons who really should do most to safeguard and
protect him. And now that society has set its sanction upon the use of
tobacco by the women of the nation, he is confronted with the further
peril of a mother who smokes. It seems to me that this tobacco question
detracts enormously from that very vivid hope we might feel for the
rising generation, which is also handicapped with alcohol and drugs.
TOBACCO ADDICTION MORE DANGEROUS THAN DRUG HABIT OR ALCOHOLISM
I have no desire to moralize upon the subject of tobacco. I am not a
moralist, but a practical student of cause and effect, urging the
elimination of bad causes so that bad effects may be eliminated in turn. A
very wide experience in studying the result of the use of narcotics has
convinced me that the total harm done by tobacco is greater than that done
by alcohol or drugs. Nothing else at the present time is contributing so
surely to the degeneration of mankind as tobacco, because, while its
damage is less immediately acute than that done by alcohol or
habit-forming drugs, it is, aside from its own evil effects, a tremendous
contributory factor to the use of both. There is nothing to be said in its
favor save that it gives pleasure, and this argument has no more force in
the case of tobacco than in the case of opium. Any man who uses tobacco
poisons himself, and the very openness and permissibility of the vice
serve to make the process of self-poisoning dangerous to the public as
well.
To sum up, the tobacco habit is useless and harmful to the man who yields
to it; it is malodorous and filthy, and therefore an infringement upon the
rights and comforts of others. Its relation to alcohol is direct and
intimate. When an alcoholic comes to me for treatment, I do not regard my
chances of success with him as good unless I can make him see that to
abandon smoking is a necessary step in his treatment. My deductions
concerning the intimate relationship between the use of tobacco and
liquors are the result of years of observation and study. And if it is
true that no man whose system is alcoholic is fit to be the father of a
child, it is no less true that the habitual smoker is also unworthy to be
a guardian of his kind. The alcoholic fiend almost invariably becomes the
parent of children provided with defective nervous systems, of children as
definitely deformed nervously as they would be physically if born with
club-feet or hare-lips.