Medicine: Indian Tobacco v. Tobacco

MEDICINEIndian Tobacco v. Tobacco

A Spanish physician whom American Indians taught to smoke tobacco introduced that indigenous American plant to Europe in 1558. Sir Walter Raleigh, whom Sir Francis Drake taught to smoke a pipe in 1586, made smoking fashionable in Elizabethan England. Now the tobacco habit is so deeply fixed among mankind that U. S. consumers alone last year bought 134,607,741,257 cigarets, 4,763,883.947 cigars, 95,875 tons of pipe tobacco, 18,030 tons of snuff. That smoking is not injurious to the vast majority of smokers is attested by the microscopic size of the anti-tobacco movement and the infrequency with which reputable physicians inveigh against tobacco. But people who do smoke too much are doubly unfortunate because their “pleasant vice” is so extremely hard to break. Writing in the current Annals of Internal Medicine, Dr. John Lanahan Dorsey of Johns Hopkins has news for weak-willed oversmokers.

Dr. Dorsey considers a “real addict” a person who smokes 20 to 50 cigarets a day. Such a person, wishing to cut out smoking, may try nerve sedatives, hard candy, astringent lozenges, gumchewing, but still his task is hard. “After a man has lit a cigar, cigaret or pipe after every meal for many years he will at first be at a loss what to do with his hands at such times. Likewise the confirmed cigaret smoker wants a cigaret between fingers or lips when under any tension.”

The Dorsey “cure” is simple. The smoker must cease abruptly and completely. Whenever he wants to smoke, he swallows a capsule containing one-eighth grain of lobeline. This is a drug which smells, tastes and affects the human system almost exactly as nicotine does. Nicotine comes from the leaves of any tobacco plant (Nicotiana), lobeline from the blue flower of the Indian tobacco plant (Lobelia inflata), a common U. S. weed which Indians used to smoke with true tobacco leaves. Lobeline, however, is not habit-forming as is nicotine. Dr. Dorsey has never found it necessary for a patient to take more than 18 doses of lobeline in any 24 hours. Usually three or four capsules a day have sufficed. “For a day or two there may be some nausea, a metallic taste, and an uncertain feeling of malaise, but no more unpleasant symptoms.”

After an habitual smoker stops, says Dr. Dorsey, his senses of smell and taste become acute. Appetite shows marked improvement. “Nervous, undernourished young women in particular are sometimes seen to undergo a renaissance. . . . Likewise the tense, active, tired man often improves his state of health.”