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THE CIGARET PLAGUE

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Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, Cal. · Sep 20, 1905

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 31, No. 38.

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THE CIGARET PLAGUE.

Why the Little Roll of Paper and Tobacco Is So Demoralizing and Deadly.
CIGARET-SMOKING was almost unknown in this country before the centennial exposition, in 1876, when it was made familiar to American eyes by exhibitors and visitors to the exposition from France, Italy, and countries farther east. With the spontaneous and pernicious activity of most vicious habits, the practise of cigaret-smoking took root, and developed in this country with marvelous rapidity, and within the last twelve or fifteen years, especially, has reached the proportions of a veritable plague, which is rapidly burning out the constitutions of the American people.
The idea has been widely propagated that the cigaret contains so little tobacco and such pure tobacco, that its effects can not be extremely harmful, and that it may be used with impunity, when the pipe, the cigar, or the quid, would almost certainly induce disease. A recent defender of the cigaret maintains that it is harmless, because the tobacco of which cigarets are generally made contains only one and one-half per cent. of nicotine, while the tobacco used in the strongest cigars shows a proportion of nicotine amounting to eight per cent., or five times as much.
This argument is wholly delusive. The cigaret is the most injurious form of tobacco, not because of the amount of nicotine it contains, but because of the enormous quantity which it introduces into the body. Nicotine does no one any harm so long as it remains in the cigar or the pipe or the cigaret; but when it is introduced into the blood and circulated through the system its mischievous work begins. The user of the pipe and the cigar-smoker receive into the system but a small proportion of the nicotine contained in the original tobacco. In the use of the cigaret the conditions are such that probably almost the entire amount of nicotine contained in the wrapper is absorbed.—Good Health.