Smoking:
Facts You Should
Know
THE REAL TRUTH ABOUT
SMOKING
We are living in a time of history when truth seems to be almost unheard-of such as the truth about smoking! The government claims that it does not know much about the harmful effects of smoking and the tobacco companies say that smoking is not harmful to our health. And yet back in the late 1930s one of the world’s leading munitions experts, and a great inventor of high explosives in his own right Hudson Maxim, referring to the world war I said this: “Thousands of our finest young men are destined to be slain, and thousands of others blinded for life, by poisonous gases inflicted upon them by Germans in the war.
“But the numbers of our men killed and the numbers injured by all the poisonous gases of the Germans will be far fewer than those who will be killed and injured by the poisonous gases of cigarette smoke which our hyper-sentimentality is inflicting upon them, while the after effects will be even worse.
I do not for one minute mean to imply that cigarette smoke is as virulent a poison as the gases employed against the troops by the Germans, but I do mean that cigarette smoke will be responsible for a larger number of deaths than the poisonous gases of the Germans, and I claim that the permanent effects of cigarette poison are even worse than the after effects of the poison gases of the Germans, because while the German gases effect the body, they do not, like the cigarette, impair the mind.
“Like the worst of the German gases, the effects of the poison of the cigarette are not immediately discernable. The main difference between such poisonous gases of the Germans, and the poisonous gas in cigarette smoke is that it requires a much longer time for the cigarette poison to produce death or serious permanent injury. The insidious, treacherous mildness of the cigarette, the vast extent of its use, and the slow degree by which it attacks, undermines and destroys the mind and body of its victims, render its fumes in time the most deadly from which our soldiers are destined to suffer.”
The evidence proving that cigarettes kill has been around for quite a while. Let’s now look at some appalling facts:
*Tobacco is a weed. It contains some of the most virulent poisons known, among them nicotine.
*The United States dispensatory reveals: Nicotine in its action on the animal system, is one of the most virulent poisons known. One form of it in a state of concentrated solution is enough to destroy a dog, and small birds perish at the approach of a tube containing it. Three drops of nicotine placed upon the shaven skin of a cat’s back will put a cat to sleep in twenty minutes, eight drops of nicotine will kill a horse in four minutes.
*There is enough nicotine in one pound of tobacco to kill three hundred horses.
*The nicotine contained in one pound of tobacco is sufficient to kill a hundred men, if injected subcutaneously into the blood.
*It has been contended by some that the amount of nicotine contained in tobacco is insignificant. But studies refute these contentions. It has been found that 14-33 percent of the nicotine present in tobacco is found in the smoke. Five milligrams of nicotine are in the puffed smoke of one cigarette. Almost 90 percent of this is absorbed into the blood stream if the smoke is inhaled into the lungs and 20 percent less if the smoke is merely taken into the mouth.
*The Indians used to poison their arrows by dipping them into nicotine thereby causing convulsions and death.
*Nicotine is but one of the poisons of tobacco. Acrolin, a most deadly poison to brain and nerve tissue is formed in the rapid combustion of the cigarette.
*Another poison of tobacco is pyridine. So powerful is pyridine that in concentrated form, in medicine, it has been used as a respiratory sedative in asthma, dyspnea (labored breathing) and in angina pectoris.
*In addition there is pilocarpine, formaldehyde, prussic acid, collidine and a dozen other poisons found in tobacco. Eighteen definite poisons eat at the tissues and overload the blood stream of the cigarette smoker. It is these poisons that give you that sudden lift, that feeling of elation and exhilaration.
*Carbon monoxide, another poison found in tobacco, has been a long established fact. When carbon monoxide is breathed, it displaces the oxygen from the hemoglobin of the red blood cells, thus causing rapid suffocation and death.
*In addition there are carbolic acid, ammonia, cyanogens, hydrocyanic acid, marsh gas, and deadly furfural, the last of which though less active than nicotine is fifty times more toxic than alcohol.
*According to the Centers for Disease Control, cigarettes kill 434,000 Americans every year.
*Secondhand smoke causes 50,000 deaths among nonsmokers each year in the United States.
*One of the most plainly evident effects of smoking are upon the eyes, the function of breathing and digestion. One of the first signs a smoker with bad eyes notices upon stopping the habit is improvement in his vision.
*It is an established fact that cases are on record of tobacco (smoke) filled atmosphere of a room causing death in infants.
*Tobacco has a marked destructive effect on the heart, the circulation, and upon the blood vessels. A single cigarette or cigar causes a rise of 10 to15 points in blood pressure. This mean an increase in the work of the heart amounting to 10 percent. That is the heart has to lift daily 132 foot tons instead of 112, twenty tons of energy thrown away.
*The temperature of the finger tips of seasoned smokers will drop from four to twelve degrees centigrade during the smoking of one or two cigarettes. Under the microscope it can be observed that the circulation is being slowed by a narrowing of the smaller blood vessels. This effect persists for a considerable period after smoking.
*In a study of the effects of tobacco (New York Post Graduate Medical School and Hospital of Columbia University) found that smoking caused contraction of the blood vessels of the skin, resulting in a drop of temperature of 10-15 degrees in 15 minutes during the smoking of a single cigarette. The temperature fell from 92 to 77 degrees and continued to fall for three minutes after the smoking ceased, reaching a low point of 75 degrees.
*Another effect of the poison of tobacco is to benumb the nerves of taste and smell, thus destroying the taste reflex and interfering with digestion.
*Another effect tobacco is that it decreases the activity of the salivary digestive ferments, resulting in a decreased ability to digest starch.
*More smokers have a lack of concentration than non-smokers.
*Statistics reveal the ratio of the number of smoking students having poor memory to those having poor memory who do not smoke as 38 to 1; lack of will power 32 to 1.
*Thomas Edison said this about cigarettes. “The cigarette brings degeneracy to the brain cells.” He refused to hire or employ cigarette smokers.
*As far back as 1916 manufacturers were using half the nation’s crop of maple sugar besides thousands of tons of honey, syrup, molasses and what not to make smokes appeal to all tastes.
*Cigarettes cause lung cancer. They also cause heart disease, emphysema, bronchitis, miscarriages, and cancer of the uterus, cervix, mouth, esophagus, bladder kidney, and pancreas.
----Cigarette smoke contains 35 to 61 parts per million of arsenic. This is not enough to kill a person rapidly, but it is quite probable that it has something to do with the increased cancer of the lung in the United States
----If you smoke a pack of cigarettes a day you take in 840 cubic centimeters of tobacco tar in a year. That means, you have exposed your throat and lung tissue to 27 fluid ounces of 15 full cocktail glasses of tobacco tar containing benzo-pyrene. The ugly greasy tar that is left in your ash tray on your fingers or in the filter of your cigarette filter is not nicotine. It is instead the “soot” that is left from the incomplete combustion of the tobacco—just as disagreeable and dangerous as the soot from your chimney.
----A condition known as tobacco amblyopia has been known for many years. It is a dimness of vision or a loss of vision due to poisoning by tobacco.
----Headaches and inability to read, also premature far-sightedness, cold fingertips in the morning after the first cigarette—all these are symptoms of tobacco damage. There is also a loss of the ability to see red and green colors. In every case the patient who was able to stop smoking soon regained full vision.
----If you enjoy the smell of a good meal cooking, the fleeting pleasure of a cigarette might permanently rob you of these delights. The Journal of the American medical Association for May 19, 1951, states unequivocally that a loss of the sense of smell (anosmia) may result from excessive smoking.
The tobacco industry says smoking is a personal choice, an adult habit, an issue of individual freedom.
Others say it is an addiction, pointing to the fact that every year 20 million Americans try to stop smoking, and only 3 percent have long-term success. Even among smokers who have lost a lung to cancer or undergone major cardiovascular surgery, only half can manage to stop for more that a few weeks.
Tobacco is a killer drug. It has never been known to do anyone or anything any good. It robs the soil on which it is grown, and gives back nothing in return. It gradually poisons those who work in it and undermines the health of all who use it and definitely injures the offspring of smoking mothers and fathers.
The tobacco user, the cigarette smoker is positively a drug addict. The only difference between his habit and the habit of the morphine user is that his is legalized while the morphine habit is not. The end results of the habits are the same.
All people should be free. It is their birthright. No man is free who smokes. Every individual who smokes is a slave. None who smoke do as they want to do. They do as their habit dictates and compels so long as the dictator is allowed to remain in power.
Remember, cigarettes are both a drug and a poison. Most people addicted to drugs want to break that habit. If you are a smoker why not begin today breaking this drug addiction.
“Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.”
1 Corinthians 10:31
Katy Chamberlin
