THE VOGUE OF NICOTINE.

Te Aroha News, Volume XLI, Issue 6297, 2 November 1925, Page 5

THE VOGUE OF NICOTINE.

WHEN SMOKING WAS A CRIME What would Abbas 1., that mighty and terrible ruler of Persia some centuries ago think of the modern world’s annual consumption of cigarettes, asks the New York Times Magazine. It was Abbas who cut off the lips of those of his subjects who smoked, and the noses of any who ventured to stake snuff. Once he found a man selling tobacco and threw the man and the weed together into a fire. In 1610 Mohammed IV. punished a citizen of Constantinople who, contrary to the royal edict, was discovered smoking, by ordering a hole pierced through the cartilege of his nose and a pipe inserted into it. - The offender, was on the back of an ass, with l|||tface towards the tail, and driven iljji-ough the streets of the city, while - the town criers announced his crime and punishment. Tsar Michael Fedorowitz of Russia not only had his subjects beaten publicly for smoking but often went even further, and were this crime committed a second time death was the penalty. In 1634 eye-witnesses stated that they saw eight men and one woman punished for smoking. It is a long jump from that date to 1908, but in the latter years writers in this country were beginning to comment unfavourably, on women smoking. One commentator of that date referred to the “unlovely” list of feminine smokers, and stated that there were to be found on it the names of many women of renown. He had been told the Empress of Austria smoked from'3o to 40 cigarettes daily. The Dowager Empress of Russia was also addicted to the use of the weed, as the Queen of Rumania, the Queen Regent of Spain and the Queen of Portugal. The latter, however, ‘.came honestly by her smoking proclivities, her mother being a devotee of the weed.” To-day the situation is startlingly altered, and critics of bygone times might discover themselves at a loss for words as they surveyed the modern inroads of tobacco.