The Deadly Cigarette

New Zealand Tablet, 23 August 1906, Page 22

The Deadly Cigarette

Some fifteen years ago an Italian cigar that was much affected by a certain class of smokers, was placed under chemical test by the Government at Piacenza. Among other delicacies the cigar (known as the ' Magliani ') contained a piece of lime, some powdered gypsum, a nice coil of humus (earth formed in part out of decayed vegetable matter), a splinter of wood, and a length of string. Yet the 'Magliani ' 'weed ' was a luxury compared with the sort of stuff that is loaded into American cigarettes— according to the evidence given by Mr. ' Gas ton, in Ms recent evidence before the House of Lords Committee on Juvenile Smoking. 'He said, 1 according to a despatch from London, 'that forty-seven out of the fifty-three States forming the American Union had legislation against cigarette smoking, which had been a relative success. The cigarette was the acute question in the United States' on account of the exceedingly cheap quality of the tobacco ordinarily employed, the filthy surroundings from which it was gathered, and the drugs used. The American cigarette maker devised most ingenious concoctions to please the palate, suoh as cocaine and laudanum. The American cigarette was the worst article the country sent to us— worse than Chicago tinned meat— and there should be penalties for parents who permitted juvenile smoking and upon the sellers of tobacco to children.' » Embalmed beef, white poplar flour, soapstone sugar, cotton-oil suet, glucose honey, and now cigarettes with deadly combustibles that may turn little Tommy and Harry into premature slaves of cocaine ! It gives a new and deeper meaning to the warning

words addressed by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes to young men in his ' Autocrat of the Breakfast Table ' • Let me assure you, the stain of a reverie-tweeding narcotic may strike deeper than you think for. I have seen the green leaf of early promise grow brown before its time under such, nicotian regimen, and thought the umbered meerschaum was dearly bought at the cost of a brain enfeebled and a will enslaved ' Swinburne— an ardent tobacco hater— loved James I with all his faults, ' because he slit the throat of that blackguard Raleigh, who invented this filthy smoking.' Some sturdy killers—preferably hangmenare apparently very badly wanted to deal with tie manufacturers of American cigarettes. Which is by no means saying that cigarettes made elsewhere are above suspicion. Our age may well be called, like that of Charles 11., 'the age of imposture.'