c. From the standpoint of shooting, smoking does affect performance, and more importantly, control. It is possible to become more proficient in shooting and still continue smoking, but the road is long and the progress slow. Many of our top shooters can attest to that fact. Today most of the top shooters are in the non-smoking class. It is not that they have never had the habit, but that the determination to reach the top was stronger than the addiction to tobacco. Occasionally, you may see one sport a cigar, but seldom, if ever, will you see one inhale tobacco smoke. Consequently, the crux of the problem of smoking is the inhalation of tobacco smoke. Herein lies the answer. Stop inhaling and you have solved the problem. It is the inhaled nicotine and carbon monoxide that are responsible for upsetting the normal body balance. For this reason we find many shooters making the switch from cigarettes to pipes and cigars, since the smoke of each is generally too toxic for the normal person to inhale. Performance as well as health improves accordingly. For the shooter who will consider quitting, we offer a plan, entitled “You Can Quite Smoking”, paragraph D-4, this chapter. Mark Twain once said that he had no difficulty giving up smoking, and added “I have done it a thousand times”. If you decide though, make it permanent.
3. The report of the Surgeon General of the US Public Health Service, released on 11 January 1964.
“SMOKERS DIE EARLY” it says, “Smoking cigarettes is a health hazard that calls for corrective action — and is a major cause of lung cancer and other death-dealing diseases, especially in men”, a blue-ribbon federal panel reported.
In short, the panel indicated, the more you smoke, the greater your risk of an early death. Deeply inhaled cigarette smoke sends a threat of premature death spreading through the lungs, arteries and the heart itself.
a. Lung tissue was obtained from more than 1000 postmortems, put on microscope slides and carefully examined by pathologists. The slides were identified only with coded numbers, and pathologists did not know their origin. Later, statisticians matches the pathological findings with the histories of the dead patients. The results added up to an elaborate description of progressive smoke damage.
b. Deeply inhaled smoke, the researchers found, irritates the cells that line the tiniest chambers of the lung (alveoli). The walls of the alveoli thicken, lose their elasticity and much of their ability to do their vital job of exchanging carbon dioxide for oxygen. Subjected to sudden stress — such as a cough or sneeze — the alveolar walls rupture; a minute part of the lung becomes useless.
c. Even while it is attacking the alveoli, smoke also damages the small arteries that carry blood to the interior lung surfaces for oxygenation. The artery walls become fibrous and thickened. Soon, internal deposits on the thickened walls make the arteries so narrow that little blood can get through. Eventually many tiny arteries are blocked completely.
These two sets of events alone would be enough to explain why thousands of Americans are “lung cripples”, suffering from what most U. S. Doctors call pulmonary fibrosis and chronic emphysema. But the damaging chain of events runs on.
d. The destruction of smaller blood vessels in the lung and the thickening of slightly larger ones increases the blood pressure in the pulmonary arteries and puts a strain on the right side of the heart. It also prompts the left side of the heart to work harder to pump blood against increased resistance. A healthy heart could probably stand the extra work; a heart already weakened by other difficulties might fail.
e. Even while the heart is being asked to overexert, carbon monoxide from cigarette smoke combines with red blood cells decreases their capacity to carry oxygen. As a result, the hardworking heart muscle is given less fuel to do its job. At the same time, tobacco’s nicotine causes a constriction of small arteries in the extremities and speeds up the heart, increasing its need for oxygen and complicating the coronary problem.
f. Smoking dulls the sense of taste causing loss of appetite, thus creating a loss of weight. For this reason people who give up smoking tend to stop losing weight. They begin to taste food again and enjoy eating.
4. You Can Quit Smoking!
a. A vicious, velvety trap; Light a cigarette, smoke it, taste its bitterness, put it out. Even as you do, you know that you will want another. Not that you enjoy it. You simply want it, and why?
(1) When you smoke a cigarette, for instance, nicotine, carbon monoxide, small amount of hydrocyanic acid, pyridine and various phenols and aldehydes are absorbed into your lungs and mouth. Your nervous system is momentarily stimulated. Your blood pressure goes up. Your pulse rate increases.
(2) Most important of all to the satisfaction of the habitual smoker, your blood vessels undergo a constriction. This “slows you down”. That is, after the momentary stimulation, smoking depresses, for a far longer period.
(3) When you smoke, you are artificially slowing down most of your body’s normal activities. If you are suddenly confronted with an emotional psychological emergency: adrenalin is pumped into your blood stream, your muscles tense, you breathe faster and get edgy, jittery — “nervous”. Tobacco smoke retards these natural processes by slowing the blood circulation and thus “calming you down”. You find a smoke is “good for your nerves”.
(4) If you smoke a pack and a half of cigarettes a day, you smoke an average of one cigarette every 32 minutes of your waking hours. That many crises don’t arise every day. You need cigarettes simply because your body has come to expect this depressant effect every so often. You begin consciously to want to cigarette.
(5) There is little true pleasure in smoking. The harsh taste, the hot dryness is tolerated, for the sake of tobacco’s mild narcotic effect. If it were possible for you to go without cigarettes for the next 24 hours, and then light one, you would find out how distasteful and noxious tobacco smoke really is. If you think this is an exaggeration, try it.
(6) Think back to the time many years ago when you smoked your first cigarette. How did it taste? Gaseous, strong, biting, wasn’t it? This is the experience that you may give your system 30 to 60 times a day. You are able to do it because the human mechanism is a marvelously adjustable piece of machinery which can get used to almost anything.
b. What can you do about it? You have already taken one big step toward giving up smoking: you have been thinking about the detrimental effects of smoking and about giving it up. If you want to stop smoking, think about giving it up at one fell swoop. Think of it cooly and calmly, without fear or hopelessness. Think of what it would be like to never have to smoke. Giving up smoking isn’t all self-denial; there are compensations. There are so many good things to enjoy more when you give yourself a chance to fully appreciate them. You will never want to go back to smoking.
(1) When you give up smoking, your food will taste much better. Your nose and throat and lungs will not be continuously permeated with smoke. You will begin to smell the world around you. When you walk into a garden you will smell as well as see the flowers. When you get up in the morning, you won’t find your throat clogged with phlegm, and you won’t cough or clear your throat so often.
(2) You will actually feel far less nervous. That is hard to believe — for during the first days of non-smoking you will be nervous. The depressant effect smoking has exerted on your body for years suddenly ends, and the unfamiliar effect is almost overwhelming. You will possibly be more emotional; you may laugh at trivial things and, for a while, be tense, jumpy. But gradually the nervousness diminishes. You will be calmer, more poised. For when you stop slowing down your body and cutting your energy with tobacco you will find that you have much more energy. There will be more time to get things done.
(3) A word of caution here. It is generally believed that a reformed smoker gains weight. If you have trouble with your waistline, remember this: when you stop smoking, you will not gain more than a few pounds. When you stop smoking, you will have a great increase in energy. In using up that energy, you will burn away a lot of the weight that you would otherwise put on.
(4) If you have read this far, you probably think you are about ready to swear off. Don’t do it yet.
c. To stop smoking, follow these rules:
(1) Watch and wait until some time when your life is on a fairly even keel. Don’t try it when you are leaving on an important trip, or preparing to give a big party, or when you are facing some personal emergency. Don’t postpone it too long, either, or you will lose the momentum you are gradually building up.
(2) But some sunny morning — maybe on a weekend — you will wake up feeling especially good. You will have had a good night’s sleep; you will feel fit for anything. The idea of stopping smoking will pop into your head. Why foul up a wonderful day with the noxious fumes of burning tar and nicotine? Decide, then and there quietly and firmly, that you are through with smoking! This is the moment, intelligently selected and properly prepared for, when you can get off with a running start.
(3) After you have started yourself off with as much momentum as you can, tell your friends that you have
