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The Cigarette

Improvement Era, vol. 15, no. 5, March 1912, pp. 462 to 463

Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Associations

The Cigarette.

The tobacco dealers, next to the tobacco press in our city and state, cried "blue laws," and objected vehemently and successfully to the recent effort of the City Commissioners and Chief of Police B. F. Grant to give the young people immunity, one day a week, from the deadly cigarette ! No wonder ! It is a big business The people of the United States smoked enough threeinch-long cigarettes, during 191 1, to girdle the earth nineteen times if laid in a straight line. were Ten thousand millions manufactured, and no one knows how many billions more were made by cigarette smokers themselves. This is an average for even- man, woman, and child in our land of 109 cigarettes, 80 cigars, 13 small cigars, and four pounds of tobacco, for the year. It is a shame to interfere, even for one day, with this enormous,

death-dealing trade the liberty of the corner cigar stand must ;

not be interfered with, though it drag as many boys down to the hell of physical and mental ruin as the saloon, or start ten thousand more than the public dance hall on the road to vice. Our illustrations, used some years ago in Success, show the gradual, fatal deterioration in a bright boy, from year to year, who uses cigarettes. The cigarette smoker should have a portrait of himself taken each year, and the physical deterioration shown each time should startle him into quitting the deadly habit. "Ninety-nine out of a hundred boys, between the ages of ten and seventeen years, who come to me, charged with crime, have their fingers disfigured by yellow cigarette stains. * * * A great deal of this boyhood crime is, in my mind, easy to trace to the deadly cigarette. There is something in the poison of the cigarette that seems to get into the system of the boy, and to destroy all moral fibre."— Magistrate Crane, New York City.

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"I have made the gruesome discovery that two of the largest cigarette manufacturers soak their produce in a weak solution of opium, * * * and when it is announced on authority that most cigarettes are doped with opium, the connection between cigarettes and crime is not hard to understand. Tobacco is the boy's easiest and most direct road to whiskey. When opium is added, the young man's chance of resisting the combined forces, and escaping physical, mental, — and moral harm, is slim indeed." New York City magistrate, quoted in "Success," May, 1906. "Another of the deadly influences of cigarette smoking is the gradual killing of the power of The victim begins to decision. vacillate, to waver, and to ask everybody's advice. He cannot make up his mind about anything. He loses the power to say no." Orison — Swett Marden. "I consider any young man at school, in college, or in any professional school, as seriously, indeed, almost fatally handicapped by the habit of smoking." —Andrew D. White. "Boys who smoke cigarettes are like wormy apples. They drop long before the harvest time. They rarely make failure in after life, because they do not have any after. When the other boys are taking hold of the world's work, they are concerned with the sexton and the — undertaker." David Starr Jordan. "Under no circumstances will I hire a man who smokes cigarettes. He is as dangerous on the front of a motor as the man who drinks. In fact, he is more dangerous; his nerves are apt to give way at any moment. If I find a car running badly, I immediately begin to investigate to find if the man smokes cigarettes. Nine times out of ten, he — does, and then he goes for good." Superintendent of the Lindell Street Railway, St. Louis, Mo, The cigarette creates a longing' which it cannot satisfy. Cigarette smoking impairs the digestive organs. It causes a gradual loss of appetite, and the wretched victim substitutes more cigarettes for food. He finally gets to a point where he becomes such a slave to the cigarette that he cannot do without it.