THE EFFECT OF ALCOHOL AND NICOTINE ON SHOOTING

In order to obtain the best results in shooting, a perfect co-ordination between the brain, nerves, and muscles is necessary.

A man who drinks heavily may for a time be able to shoot well, but this does not last. He can never be depended on not to “crack up” and he collapses at critical moments.

Very robust health is not necessary as long as the above conditions are fulfilled, and pistol shooting in the open air may be of benefit to a man who is in too delicate health to be able to play even a gentle game.

The old, evil days when a sportsman was not considered acting as a man unless he drank several bottles of port each evening and had to be carried home in a wheelbarrow are now, happily, gone for ever. Putting drink before all else used to be a constant annoyance. A drunkard was not content till he had reduced every man near him to the same disgusting mental and physical condition.

If others would not drink with him, he had the utmost contempt for them. Called them “milksops,” “drinkers of slops,” “unsociable,” and “too proud.”

I always refused to go out shooting with such people. Besides being very dangerous, they never would do anything but drink. Sport was a mere excuse for going out “on the drink.” Every occasion was made the excuse for a drink. With such people drink was the great event of the day, and if a stag was shot, there was a ceremony to be gone through of everyone drinking whiskey neat to “more blood.”

At lunch, after an interminable time spent in drinking—they eat little—the forester who had been fidgeting to get off, would come up at last and timidly say, “I’m thinking the sooner we go the best, I am seeing a verra heavy beast in yon corrie, with the glass.”

The “sportsman” would answer, “Is there? open the other bottle of champagne and help yourself, it won’t hurt you, there is not a headache in a dozen bottles.”

Drink used to pose as the twin brother and boon companion of sport.

In these days drink is known as the sportsman’s deadliest enemy.

I consider even minute medicinal doses of alcohol are deleterious to shooting, entirely apart from drunkenness. Admiral Jellicoe, speaking at Gibraltar in 1911, quoted with approval a statement of Captain Ogilvy, the noted gunnery instructor, to the effect that carefully compiled statistics revealed the fact that the shooting efficiency of the men was thirty per cent. better before than after the issue of the grog ration ... one eighth of a pint of rum liberally diluted with water.

In Bavaria the Minister of War carried out tests as to the effect of alcohol on marksmanship during twenty days on twenty marksmen (shortly before the war), 80,000 shots were fired, and the trial showed according to the report of Professor D. R. Kraeplin, that the consumption of forty grammes of alcohol, corresponding to the amount contained in one and three quarters pints of beer, made an average reduction in marksmanship of three per cent. The effect was most perceptible twenty-five to thirty minutes after absorbing the alcohol.

Most of the marksmen shot even worse, some of them from eight to twelve per cent. worse.

The Professor continues: “An amusing feature of the tests was that some of the riflemen insisted not only that they could, but actually were shooting better after drinking the spirits, whilst in reality their marksmanship had fallen off as much as ten per cent.”

The late Sir Victor Horsley permitted me to quote the following from one of his lectures.

These facts bear out in every particular my own observations in watching others.

I find they are not so active in their movements, especially if they have to turn round suddenly to shoot, but at the same time they had more confidence in their ability to shoot.

Who has not seen (to go to the extreme case) when a large dose of alcohol has been swallowed and a man is “under the influence of liquor” that the “patient” is ready to fight all comers, although he cannot stand on his legs.

As Professor Kraeplin says, “the subject experimented on cannot judge—he thinks alcohol makes him shoot better although the actual facts are the other way about.”

At the Olympic Games which take place each four years, the members of the United States Rifle and Revolver Teams which compete are water-drinkers and non-smokers, and they are practically unbeaten to date.

Major Smith W. Brookhart of the Ordnance Department, United States National Guard, writing in Arms and the Man, May 4, 1918, says: “Civilization has advanced so much in the past decade, that it is now almost superfluous to write a caution against the use of stimulants. Every rifleman will admit that alcohol is an enemy. Total abstinence, bone dry, is the only safe rule. Tobacco or any other stimulants should also be avoided. They may not be so fatal as alcohol, but they all tend in the wrong direction. The man who wants to climb into the championship class and stay there must be a normal man. The proper attitude of mind will give every man more pleasure in conquering a habit than in submitting to it. To win over the smoking habit is an achievement of which to be proud and it improves the scores.”

Those who make a moderate use of alcohol and tobacco are gradually reduced as to the quantity they use some weeks or even months before the actual Games, until all the members of the teams are non-smokers and water-drinkers.

There is this to be said of the smoker, as long as you do not try to prevent his stifling you with his smoke he does not pester you to imitate his example like a drinker does.

He merely pityingly informs you that “you do not know what you have missed.”

As the “joy” missed consists of chronic sore throat, palpitating heart, and shaky nerves, I cannot see that much is missed by the non-smoker.

The invariable answer to the question “what pleasure do you find in smoking” is “it soothes the nerves.”

Healthy normal nerves need no soothing.When an automatic function of the body is normal and healthy, it does not indicate its presence.

A man does not feel his heart when it is healthy, only when it is diseased.

In the same way a man who has not injured his nerves by nicotine or alcohol does not know that he has any nerves, but on the other hand, nerves being destroyed by narcotics fight back, and make their agony known.

A man would fight against his headache being “soothed” by being clubbed over the head.

As well might one say a man half insensible from concussion needs “soothing” by being knocked completely out. If this soothing of the nerves is persisted in, a man sinks lower mentally than an animal.

A man in the last stage of nicotine poisoning, when told by his doctor, “you must either give up smoking or you will die” answered “then I prefer to die.”

What a glorious death! How true the dictum of Sir Oliver Lodge that the supreme outcome of 500,000 years of effort by the Universe has been, man!

The following appeared in the Daily Mail of September 25, 1917. It shows how men risk not only their own lives but hundreds of other lives rather than give up smoking. What a blessing if Dr. Furlong’s suggestion of nicotine tablets is adopted.

We non-smokers will no longer have to walk the streets, eat our meals, sit in theatres, and travel in railway trains breathing an atmosphere of tobacco, and burnt paper smoke.

Shellworkers’ Craving to Smoke.

To the Editor of the Daily Mail:

Sir: As some men in munition factories will run the risk of smoking in spite of their liability to fines and as others, even if they do not smoke during working hours, carry matches in their pockets, it is necessary to consider what is best to be done to prevent explosions.

I believe that if tablets of nicotine were manufactured, each one representing the drug value of say one cigarette, they would constitute a real safeguard against such accidents. One or two of these tablets would remove the craving for a smoke and check the irritability caused by the want of it.

I do not wish to convey that nicotine tablets would ever take the place of smoking, but they would have the advantage of safety, and no disadvantage that I know of except that they are a little slower in action.

Early in the war I advocated the introduction of these tablets for use in special circumstances, but unfortunately up to the present the idea has not been utilized.

Wm. Verner Furlong, M.D.

16, Pembroke Road, Dublin.