CIGARETS

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · May 22, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 21.

Do you know how they are made? I think I can enlighten you. An Italian boy only eight years old, was brought before a justice in New York City as a vagrant, or, in other words, a young tramp. But with what did the officer charge him?—Only with picking up cigar stumps from the streets and gutters. To prove this he showed the boy’s basket half full of stumps, water-soaked, and covered with mud.

“What do you do with these?” asked the justice.

“I sell them to a man for ten cents a pound, to be used in making cigarets.”

Boys and girls scour the streets in search of half-burned cigars and stumps, which are dried and then sold to be used in making cigarets.

But this is not all, nor even the worst of it. These cigarets have been analyzed, and 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 cigarets is appalling.” “Havana flavoring” for this same purpose is sold by the thousand barrels. This flavoring is made from a bean that contains a deadly poison. The wrappers, warranted to be rice-paper, are sometimes made of common paper, and sometimes of filthy scrapings of rag-pickers, bleached with arsenic.—Selected.