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 pharmacopœia, 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.