HEALTH BULLETIN #9
WARNING!
STIMULANTS AND NARCOTICS: TOBACCO
We who work in favor of temperance have a work to do in educating the people in these lines. We must teach them that health, character, and even life, are endangered by the use of stimulants, which excite the exhausted energies to unnatural, spasmodic action.
In relation to tea, coffee, tobacco, and alcoholic drinks, the only safe course is to touch not, taste not, handle not. The tendency of tea, coffee and similar drinks is in the same direction as that of alcoholic liquor and tobacco, and in some cases the habits is as difficult to break as it is for the drinker to give up intoxicants.
Tobacco is also a slow, insidious, but most malignant poison. In whatever form it is used, it tells upon the constitution; it is all the more dangerous because its effects are slow and at first hardly perceptible. It excites and then paralyzes the nerves. It weakens and clouds the brain. often it affects the nerves in a more powerful manner than does intoxicating drink. It is more subtle, and its effects are difficult to eradicate from the system. It uses excites a thirst for strong drink and in many cases lays the foundation for the liquor habit.
The use of tobacco is inconvenient, expensive, unclean, defiling to the user, and offensive to others. It devotees are encountered everywhere. You rarely pass through a crowd but some smoker puffs his poisoned breath in your face. It is unpleasant and unhealthful to remain in a room where the atmosphere is laden with the fumes of liquor and tobacco. Though men persist in using these poisons themselves, what right have they to defile the air that others must breathe?
Among children and youths, the use of tobacco is working untold harm. The unhealthful practices of past generations affect the children and youth of today. Mental inability, physical weakness, disordered nerves, and unnatural cravings are transmitted as a legacy from parents to children. And the same practices, continued by the children, are increasing, and perpetuating the evil results. To this cause, in no small degree is owing the physical, mental, and moral deterioration which is becoming such a cause of alarm.
Young boys and girls begin the use of tobacco at a very early age. The habit thus formed when body and mind are especially susceptible to its effects, undermines the physical strength, dwarfs the body, stupefies the mind, and corrupts the morals.
But what can be done to teach children and youths the evils of a practice of which parents, teachers, doctors and even the clergy set them the example? "My father uses tobacco" or pointing the pastor or the school principal, they say, "Such a man smokes; what harm for me to do has he does"? Many workers in the temperance cause and medical field are addicted to the use of tobacco. What power can such a person have to stay the progress of intemperance?
The Ministry of Healing, p. 328,335 (excerpts). |
