THE CIGARETTE MANIA.

Taranaki Herald, Volume LV, Issue 13967, 27 July 1909, Page 3

THE CIGARETTE MANIA.

ITS VICTIMS

Awhile ago the New Zealand Times published a paragraph detailing exactly the miseries suffered by a youth who habitually sucked cigarettes, and who at the age of sixteen was a mere physical wreck, a hopeless cigarette maniac and a certainty for the asylum. While a minister of religion (who is by no means a crank) was in the country recently a young man showed him the paragraph and merely said, "That's me." The minister spoke warningly to the youth, with what effect one cannot foresee. Auckland papers, guided by the original paragraph, made inquiries among medical men, who roundly condemned the smoking of cigarettes by undeveloped people. Then one finds this in a Sydney paper: — John Ashman, twenty years of age, was employed as a barman at the Football Club Hotel, Pitt Street, Carlton. His trade was hooflnaking, and he seems to have been very despondent because he could not get work of that description. At 10 o'clock on Sunday night Mrs. Scarlett, licensee of the hotel, saw Ashman in the back parlour as she went to bed. At about 3 o'clock in the morning she was awakened by a noise like that of a chair being knocked over, and went down to the kitchen, where she found Ashman hanging by the neck from a rafter. At first she could hardly believe that he had taken his life, and cried. "Are you joking, Jack?" Then she saw that it was no joke, but a grim reality, and, snatching up a knife, cut the hotly down. It tell into her arms, still warm, but quite dead. Beneath the spot where Aslunan hung was a chair, which he had obviously kicked away, and it was this noise which had awakened Mrt>. Scarlett. The police were informed, and Constable Bird took charge of the body. At-hman had been employed at the hotel for about three months, and \h said to havo been an inveterate cigarette ismoker. He had been known to consume six packets of cigarettes in a single day. Ashman's body was removed to the morgue, where the coioner was to inquire into the circumI stances of his death.