The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT In Defense of Lady Nicotine By William E. Bohn The Tobacco Industry Research Committee speaks up for mankind's most comforting weed in a handsomely printed statement. As a consumer...
...Belgium is not to be overlooked as a contributor...
...was more than 6 billion pounds a year way back in 1938...
...In France, the Government has for many years derived a great part of its income from Government manufacture of the worst tobacco in the world...
...In the United States, too, we are not above making tobacco smokers or chewers or the sneezers of snuff bear a large part of the burdens of state...
...He must have foreseen the possibility of supplying a prime source of revenue to the future French Republic...
...The tobacco men reply cogently, but somehow without any great sense of conviction: All right, the use of automobiles went up at the same time...
...When you roll along their highways, you see the rich green-brown plants stretching away for mile after mile...
...From there the brown leaf spread to Turkey, Egypt, China, India, the Indies...
...Some time later, Sir Walter Raleigh carried to England the strange brown leaf to which the American natives had given the name "tobacco...
...What we are dealing with, then, is a product which goes way back in human history, which has long been associated with human life...
...Benson will seem like a Sunday-school picnic...
...It is natural to resort to the habitual form of reasoning: post hoc, ergo propter hoc...
...And in the peace-pipe the odoriferous smoke served to bestow a magic blessing upon the most serious decisions of war and peace...
...The United States burns up more per capita than any other country, but there is no country which does not consume a goodly quantity...
...Among the natives of the New World, tobacco was considered powerful medicine...
...Such northern states as Wisconsin and Massachusetts produce significant amounts...
...In general, it has not been considered as wicked as alcoholic liquor...
...It was not for long that Great Britain, among the so-called civilized nations, was able to monopolize the blessings of tobacco...
...It was more than 450 years ago that Columbus and his sailors saw the Indians strolling about with little brown tubes in their mouths from which smoke mysteriously ascended...
...so did the wearing of nylon stockings-but no one blames Ford or du Pont for cancer of the lung...
...Canada produces her share...
...From the point of view of logic, the Committee's spokesmen have tackled an almost impossible task...
...I suppose they had never heard of cancer of the lung...
...Even during the most rigorous days of Prohibition, some clergymen held that moderate use of tobacco was not a sinful indulgence...
...I seem to be the only one who is going sentimental about this business...
...In making this informal survey...
...The United States is today the greatest producer, but is closely followed by the other great countries...
...No one knows how long the native Americans had drawn comfort from the prolific leaf...
...A number of circumstances have favored the development of tobacco as a source of revenue...
...States like North Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee raise many hundreds of millions of pounds...
...And the poor Secretary of Agriculture will have a headache beside which that of our present stubborn Mr...
...A new generation of bootleggers and hijackers will grow prosperous...
...If it turns out that tobacco is an important cause of cancer, the cultivation, manufacture and sale of Sir Walter Raleigh's discovery will have to be forbidden...
...India comes next, then China-with the U.S.S.R., surprisingly, not far behind...
...Jean Nicot, French Ambassador at Lisbon, sent a supply of the sacred seeds to his queen, Catherine de Medici...
...In the mounds which dot my Midwest, we find artistically carved stone pipes in the form of birds and beasts which must long antedate the coming of the whiles...
...When you include the toilers in the factories, the salesmen and advertisers, you realize that here we are dealing with one of the world's great industries...
...As a consumer of uncounted pounds of their product, I read their argument with a good deal of sympathy...
...They are hired to prove a negative...
...At the same time, the consumption of tobacco has zoomed upward...
...During the past twenty years, cases of cancer of the lung have increased at an alarming rate...
...Perhaps some statistician can tell me the number of human beings whose livelihood depends upon this worldwide business...
...World production, my Britannica tells me...
...Production is not limited, as one is inclined to think, to southern lands...
...Consumption of the redolent weed is astonishingly widespread...
...In wide regions, nearly the whole population subsists on tobacco work...
...I am not contributing to the argument about tobacco and lung cancer...
...Congress and the state legislatures will pass laws...
...Therefore, no one's conscience was bothered if Congress and the state legislatures permitted the manufacture and sale of tobacco in its various forms but, at the same time, heaped upon this trade a completely illogical weight of taxation...
Vol. 37 • May 1954 • No. 18
