CIGARETTE PAPER.

White Ribbon, Volume 23, Issue 272, 18 February 1918, Page 4

CIGARETTE PAPER.

A writer in "Harper’s Weekly" says: "Cigarettes are not merely rolls of tobacco. They are not drugged with expensive |M>isons as is charged, but they have a peculiarity. The combination of burning paper and tobacco m.ekes a compound which is neither tobacco smoke nor paper smoke, but has a name which chemists know and a smell which everybody knows. There is not much of the new compound, but in what there is of it lies the idiosyncrasy of the cigarette. Thomas Edison may be sup|>osed to know what he is talking about when he says: " 'Acrolein is one of the most terrible drugs in its effects on the hunt »n body. The burning of ordinary c’garette paper always produces acrolein. That is what makes the smoke so irritating. I really believe that it often makes boys insane. We sometimes develop acrolein in this taboraton in our experiments with glycerine. One whiff of it from the oven drove one of my assistants out of the building the other day. I can hardly exaggerate the dangerous nature of acrolein, and yet that is what a boy or man is dealing with every time he smokes an ordinary cigarette.’"