If any one thinks that China is the gainer by substituting the one drug habit for the other, I beg leave to differ with him. The opium-smoker smokes in private with other smokers, and is thus not offensive to other people. He is not injuring non-smokers, or arousing the curiosity of boys, or polluting the atmosphere, or creating a craving in others. In the West the opium habit is generally condemned because the West is able to look with a new and unbiased mind on a drug habit that is not its own.
I consider that cigarette-smoking is the greatest vice devastating humanity to-day, because it is doing more than any other vice to deteriorate the race.
LIKE ACTION OF THE THREE HABITS
The more you compare smoking and drinking and drugging, the more resemblances you see. Opium, like tobacco and alcohol, ceases to stimulate the moment the effect of it is felt: it then becomes a narcotic. The history of the three as a resort in an emergency is precisely the same. At the time when the average man feels that he needs his faculties most, he will, if addicted to any of the three, deliberately seek stimulation from it. He does not intend to go on long enough to get the narcotic effect, since that would be clearly defeating his own aims; he means to stop with the stimulant and sedative effect, but that he is unable to do. The inhaler of tobacco gets his effect in precisely the same way that the opium-smoker gets his—the rapid absorption by the tissues of the bronchial tubes. It may be news to the average man to hear that the man who smokes opium moderately suffers no more physical deterioration than the man who inhales tobacco moderately. The excessive smoker of cigarettes experiences the same mental and physical disturbance when deprived of them that the opium-smoker experiences when deprived of opium. The medical treatment necessary to bring about a physiological change in order to destroy the craving is the same. The effect of giving up the habit is the same—cessation of similar physical and nervous and mental disturbances, gain in bodily weight and energy, and a desire for physical exercise. A like comparison, item for item, may be made with alcohol, but it is the similarity with opium which I wish particularly to emphasize here.
TOBACCO AND MORAL SENSITIVENESS
Morphine, as is very well known, will distort the moral sense of the best person on earth; it is part of the action of the drug. Since the way morphine gets its narcotic effect is very similar to the way tobacco gets its effect, one would naturally suppose that tobacco would produce in a milder degree something of the same moral distortion. This may seem a startling conclusion, but change your mental attitude and observe. Have not smokers undergone a noticeable moral deterioration in at least one particular? They have a callous indifference to the rights of others. This happens with all habitual indulgence, of course, but is it not carried more generally to an extreme with tobacco than with anything else? Few men quarrel with a hostess who does not offer them drinks, but all habitual smokers expect that, regardless of her own desires, she will let them smoke after dinner.
“We gave up the fight against tobacco in our drawing-rooms long ago,” said a famous London hostess. “We found it was a case of no smoke, no men.”
Respectable men in New York City who would not dream of deliberately breaking any other law carry cigars and cigarettes into the subway despite the fact that it is forbidden and that it is vitally necessary to keep the air there as pure as possible. A gentleman is more annoyed at being forced to consult another’s preference about not smoking than about anything else that could arise in social intercourse, and is often at small pains to conceal his impatience with old-fashioned people who believe they have rights which should be respected.
On all sides the attitude seems to be, “What right has any one to object to my smoking?” The matter is really on just the opposite basis, “What right has any one to smoke when other people object to it?”
If a man must get drunk, we say he shall get drunk where he is a nuisance only to himself and to others of the same mind. If a man feels the need of interlarding his conversation with obscenity and grossness, we say he may not compel us to listen to him. But a smoker may with impunity pollute the air, offend the nostrils, and generally make himself a nuisance to everybody in his neighborhood who does not practise his particular vice. Is this not a kind of moral obtuseness? Change your mental attitude and consider.