As well might one say a man half insensible from concussion needs “soothing” by being knocked completely out. If this soothing of the nerves is persisted in, a man sinks lower mentally than an animal.
A man in the last stage of nicotine poisoning, when told by his doctor, “you must either give up smoking or you will die” answered “then I prefer to die.”
What a glorious death! How true the dictum of Sir Oliver Lodge that the supreme outcome of 500,000 years of effort by the Universe has been, man!
The following appeared in the Daily Mail of September 25, 1917. It shows how men risk not only their own lives but hundreds of other lives rather than give up smoking. What a blessing if Dr. Furlong’s suggestion of nicotine tablets is adopted.
We non-smokers will no longer have to walk the streets, eat our meals, sit in theatres, and travel in railway trains breathing an atmosphere of tobacco, and burnt paper smoke.
Shellworkers’ Craving to Smoke.
To the Editor of the Daily Mail:
Sir: As some men in munition factories will run the risk of smoking in spite of their liability to fines and as others, even if they do not smoke during working hours, carry matches in their pockets, it is necessary to consider what is best to be done to prevent explosions.
I believe that if tablets of nicotine were manufactured, each one representing the drug value of say one cigarette, they would constitute a real safeguard against such accidents. One or two of these tablets would remove the craving for a smoke and check the irritability caused by the want of it.
I do not wish to convey that nicotine tablets would ever take the place of smoking, but they would have the advantage of safety, and no disadvantage that I know of except that they are a little slower in action.