Searchlights on Health/The Destructive Effects of Cigarette Smoking
THE DESTRUCTIVE EFFECTS OF CIGARETTE SMOKING.
Cigarettes have been analyzed, and the most physicians and chemists were surprised to find how much opium is put into them. A tobacconist himself says that "the extent to which drugs are used in cigarettes is appalling." "Havana flavoring" for this same purpose is sold everywhere by the thousand barrels. This flavoring is made from the tonka-bean, which contains a deadly poison. The wrappers, warranted to be rice paper, are sometimes made of common paper, and sometimes of the filthy scrapings of ragpickers bleached white with arsenic. What a thing for human lungs.
The habit burns up good health, good resolutions, good manners, good memories, good faculties, and often honesty and truthfulness as well.
Cases of epilepsy, insanity and death are frequently reported as the result of smoking cigarettes, while such physicians as Dr. Lewis Sayre, Dr. Hammond, and Sir Morell Mackenzie of England, name heart trouble, blindness, cancer and other diseases as occasioned by it.
Leading physicians of America unanimously condemn cigarette smoking as "one of the vilest and most destructive evils that ever befell the youth of any country," declaring that "its direct tendency is a deterioration of the race."
Look at the pale, wilted complexion of a boy who indulges to excessive cigarette smoking. It takes no physician to diagnose his case, and death will surely mark for his own every boy and young man who will follow up the habit. It is no longer a matter of guess. It is a scientific fact which the microscope in every case verifies.