Anecdotes on Antidotes
Early Stop Smoking Claims

In that long-ago Victorian time, an Ohio-born teacher and newspaperwoman named Lucy Page Gaston founded an organization in Chicago that became the Anti-Cigarette League of America. She was a member of the anti-alcohol Women’s Christian Temperance Union and structured the new organization similarly. Her theory was that cigarette smoking led to harder stuff like booze and narcotics.

Naturally, the more entreprenurially minded saw the burgeoning movement to bring about social change in the U.S. as a way to net some traditional change – the kind that jingles in the pocket. By 1895, a chemical company in Springfield, Mass. was selling a product called Narcoti-Cure for $5 a bottle.

Drink it, the company advertised, and your craving for cigarettes disappeared. That’s because you were likely zonked out on some opiate, cocaine derivative or alcohol contained in their product, but hey, no one’s perfect.

Twenty years later, despite the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906, purveyors of quack medicine continued to cash in on the anti-smoking movement, which by 1909 had actually succeeded in getting cigarettes banned in 12 states.

One of those people was whoever bought a half-page ad for the Feb. 1915 issue of an iconoclastic Austin weekly called K. Lamity’s Harpoon. Founded in 1902, the magazine had a national circulation. The ad touted a San Antonio business called The Anti-Smoke Co. No street address accompanied the ad, just a post office box number.

“Anti-Smoke Has the Punch To Knock Out Cigarettes, Cigars, Pipes, Chewing of Tobacco or Dipping of Snuff,” the ad declared up front. “Anti-smoke has knocked the tobacco habit from others. WHY NOT YOU?”

To break the tobacco habit (the ad no where mentions the word “nicotine,” all a person had to do was open a bottle of Anti-Smoke and “simply gargle your throat and rinse your mouth out with it twice or more a day.”

How the product did this went unexplained in the ad, but the idea is reminiscent of more modern drugs that are used to treat alcoholics by making them feel sick if they ingest alcohol while on the drug. As the 1915 ad puts it, “You can’t use tobacco and use Anti-Smoke. You must give up one or the other.”

The ad included four excerpts from letters purportedly penned by satisfied Anti-Smoke customers. The first, from Canada, noted that “a friend” had tried the remedy and “proclaimed it OK,” so the writer from Ontario was enclosing $1 for two bottles. Another testimonial writer, from Hot Springs, SD, said a friend had “highly recommended” Anti-Smoke and that he had decided to try it. A third supposedly satisfied customer asserted that the medicine had “had the desired effect.”

The final letter came from someone living in Era, a tiny community in Cooke County in North Texas. The writer said he had ordered two bottles of Anti-Smoke the previous April, but that “less than one bottle cured me of the cigarette habit.” And while the concoction from the Alamo City apparently broke the man of smoking, it left his sense of humor intact. “I did not use them [cigarettes] to excess,” the man continued, “only smoked 50 or 60 a day.” He concluded that, “Your remedy will do the work and do it quick and without inconvenience to the user.”

The product sold for 50 cents a bottle, postage paid “to the house of any reader of the Harpoon….” Stamps or money orders were acceptable means of payment.

Just how long the San Antonio-based company that manufactured this product remained in business is not known. In fact, an online search turns up no mention of the firm or its product. But Anti-Smoke clearly never achieved the name recognition enjoyed by many brands of the combustible product it purported to counter.

World War I and the widely accepted perception that cigarettes could calm a person’s nerves set the anti-smoking movement way back, and the freewheeling 1920s pretty much extinguished the sentiment to meddle with American tobacco consumption. At least for the next 40-something years.


© Mike Cox - August 30, 2012 column
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