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.