Opium den

“ I have good reason to believe that, even at this day, the number of persons addicted to the habitual use of opium is far beyond the imagination of people generally:—even of persons who have looked into the matter somewhat, but who have never used the drug, or made its use a matter of special observation for years. I have good reason to believe that even now the use of opium is carried on to such an extent, that a census of the victims would strike the country with terror and alarm. ”

“ Poisons of the strychnia and hydro-cyanic acid classes (including this just mentioned opium alkaloid, thebain) are swifter agents; but this perilous opium quintette sings to every sense a lulling song from which it may not awake for years, but wakes a slave. Every day that a man uses opium these cumulative alkaloids get a subtler hold on him. Even a physician addicted to the practice has no conception how their influence piles up. ”

“ The opium of commerce is produced in hot countries; but even in England, any one who chooses may procure a small quantity of opium, by wounding the fleshy capsule of the common White Poppy when it is about half ripe. A milky juice will issue from the wound, which when dry becomes opium, and would be poisonous if taken in excess. The capsule of the White or Opium Poppy has, when ripe, a little window-like opening under each stigma for the discharge of the seeds, which contain abundance of oil, and may be safely eaten, though the rest of the plant is poisonous. ”

“ The opium-eater now only continues his habit to preserve the terrible static condition to which it has reduced him, and to prevent that yet more terrible dynamic condition into which he comes with every disturbance of equilibrium; a condition of energetic and agonizing dissolutions which must last until every fibre of wrongly-changed tissue is burned up and healthily replaced. Though I have called the early reactions of opium rapid, they are necessarily much less so than those produced by a simple chemical agent. No drug approaches it in the possession of cumulative characteristics ”

“ Even if the use of opium was positively beneficial to the intellect, still its dreadful havoc with the physical system would far more than outweigh its contributions in that direction. But, so far is that from being the truth in the case, that opium, at best, has only a revealing, a disclosing power; it cannot, even in the lowest sense of the term, be called a creative lower. ”

“ Properly speaking, all the positive effects of opium must be internal; for all its movements are inward in their direction, being refluent upon the focal centres of life. Thus, one of the most noticeable phenomena connected with opium-eating is the burden of life resting back upon the heart, which deliberately pulsates the moments of existence, as if the most momentous issues depended upon each separate throb. But this very reflux of sensibility will produce great effects at the surface, which are purely negative. ”

“ I wish to emphasize the fact that the system of a mere neophyte, with nothing to neutralize the effects of the drug save the absorbency, so to speak, of the pain for which it was given, could so rapidly adapt itself to them as to demand an increase of the dose in such an alarming ratio. There are certain men to whom opium is as fire to tow, and my friend was one of these. On the first of October he sensibly perceived the trifling dose of fifty drops; on the first of November he was taking, without increased sensation, an ounce vial of "M'Munn" daily. ”

“ No opium dens have been allowed since 1907 in their possessions or leased territories in China by Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia or Japan.
The difficulties of the task undertaken by the Chinese government to eradicate a national and popular vice, in a country whose population is generally estimated at 400,000,000, are increased by the fact that the opium habit has been indulged in by all classes of society, that opium has been practically the principal if not the only national stimulant ”

“ The object I have in view is not, however, so much to make suggestions to medical men as it is to awaken in the victims of opium the feeling that they can master the tyrant by such acts of resolution, patience, and self-control as most men are fully capable of exhibiting. Certain conditions, however, seem to be the almost indispensable preliminaries to success in relinquishing opium by those who have been long habituated to its use. The first and most important of these is a firm conviction on the part of the patient that the task can be accomplished. ”

“ It is scarcely necessary to premise that no such thing as a succedaneum for opium is comprehended in the list of these agents. Any drug which would so nearly accomplish for the opium-eater what opium accomplishes that he would not miss the latter, must be nowise preferable to opium itself. Such a drug must be able to prevent the decompositions which cause the suffering ”

“ Opium weakens or utterly paralyzes the lower propensities, while it invigorates and elevates the superior faculties, both intellectual and affectional. The opium-eater is without sexual appetite; anger, envy, malice, and the entire hell-brood claiming kin to these, seem dead within him, or at least asleep; while gentleness, kindness, benevolence, together with a sort of sentimental religionism, constitute his habitual frame of mind. If a man has a poetical gift, opium almost irresistibly stirs it into utterance. ”

“ Good opium is hard in the cold, but becomes flexible and doughy when it is worked between the hot hands. It has a characteristic smell, which by heat becomes stronger, and very offensive to the nostrils of many persons. It has a very bitter taste. Water first softens, and then reduces it to a pasty magma. Proof spirit digested upon opium forms laudanum, being a better solution of its active parts than can be obtained by either water or strong alcohol alone. Water distilled from it acquires its peculiar smell, but carries over no volatile oil. ”

“ It is a very different thing to cure a man of acute from curing him of chronic opium-poisoning; and my own large experience, together with that of all the most experienced, the soundest and most skillful men that I have ever known as successful practitioners among these cases, points to the unanimous conclusion that it is not safe, either to mind or body, to make the abrupt transition required of an old opium-eater who must give up his drug in toto and at once, especially after such an acute attack as that just described. ”

“ In the first stages, opium commits its ravages on the human system by expansion and explosion; in the after stages, it does its work by contraction and compression; the weary victim totters beneath a heavy load.
In the first stages he has occasional periods of enjoyment; in the latter he has none; he is so benumbed by opium as to be incapable of enjoyment. Temporary manumission from positive pain or distress only brings out into stronger relief his miserable situation. He sees and feels that he is not happy; cannot be at his best ”

“ In short, to sum up all in one word, a man who is, inebriated, or tending to inebriation, is, and feels that he is in a condition which calls up into supremacy the merely human, too often the brutal, part of his nature; but the opium-eater (I speak of him who is not suffering from any disease, or other remote effects of opium) feels that the diviner part of his nature is paramount ”

“ It is largely used by suicides; and children, being very susceptible to its influence, frequently die from misadventure after administration of an overdose of the drug. The ordinary preparations of opium are the drug itself, which is the inspissated juice of the oriental poppy, and the tincture, commonly known as laudanum. Opium contains a variety of more or less active principles, the chief of which is the alkaloid morphia, which is present in good opium to the extent of about 10% in combination with meconic acid, which is physiologically inactive. ”

“ Fortunately, much the greater number of opium-eaters take the drug in small quantities or have made use of it for only a limited period. In their case the process of recovery is relatively easy; the functions of their physical organization still act for the most part in a normal way; they have to retrace comparatively few steps and for comparatively a short time. Even to the inveterate consumer of the drug it has been made manifest that he may emancipate himself from his bondage if he will manfully accept the conditions upon which alone he can accomplish it. ”

“ All the effects produced after that by the opium, are to keep the body at that level of sensation in which one feels positively alive and capable to act, without being impeded or weighed down by physical languor and impotence. Such languor and impotence one feels from abstaining merely a few hours beyond the wonted time of taking the dose. It is not pleasure, then, that drives onward the confirmed opium-eater, but a necessity scarce less resistible than that Fate to which the pagan mythology subjected gods not less than men. ”

“ Miserably for the opium-eater, fortunately for the young person who may be dissuaded from following in his footsteps, we are left in no doubt of this matter by the conclusions of experience. In practical action opium affects as large an area of nervous surface, attacks it with as much intensity, and changes it in as many ways as its complexity would lead us to expect. I have pointed out the existence in opium of a convulsive poison congeneric with brucia. ”

“ With persons whom opium violently constricts, or in whom it excites nausea, there is little danger that its use will degenerate into a habit. Those, however, over whose nerves it spreads only a delightful calm, whose feelings it tranquillizes, and in whom it produces an habitual state of reverie, are those who should be upon their guard lest the drug to which in suffering they owe so much should become in time the direst of curses. Persons of the first description need little caution, for they are rarely injured by opium. ”

“ This tendency the reforming opium-eater can not afford to overlook, for no one effect of the experiment is more distressing than the marvellous and unhealthy activity given to this organ by the process through which he is passing. The testimony of all opium-eaters on this point is uniform. For months and even years this organ in those who have relinquished the drug remains disordered. When in its worst state, the use of something bitter, the more bitter the better, is exceedingly grateful. The difficulty lies in finding any thing that has a properly bitter taste. ”

“ Opium is the Proteus of medicine, and science has not yet succeeded in tearing away the many masks it wears, nor in tracing the marvellously diversified aspects it is capable of assuming. Among many cases of the relinquishment of opium with which I have been made acquainted, nothing is more perplexing than the difference of the specific consequences, as they are exhibited in persons of different temperaments and habits. ”

“ The appetite for opium at this time is generally master of the man; it rages like the hunger of a wild beast.
If a person when in this condition had any human feelings or aspirations, he might resist and go on, if of constitution sufficient; but the difficulty is, it is necessary for the poor wretch to take opium to have natural feelings, or to place any reliance upon the future. It is generally the case, at this stage, that the opium eater would wade through blood for opium. All else in the world is nothing to him without it, and for it he would exchange the world and all there is in it. ”

“ The only way in which opium promotes perspiration is by shutting up all the other excretory processes of the body, and throwing the entire labor of that function upon the pores. (When the skin gives out the opium-eater is shut up like an entirely choked chimney, and often dies in delirium of blood- poisoning.) ”

“ In many cases where the moral sense has suffered no such general bouleversement, the tendency which opium superinduces to look at every thing from the most sanguine point of view—the vague, dreamy habit of thought and the inability to deal with hard facts or fixed quantities—make it necessary to take an opium-eater's assertions upon any subject with a certain degree of allowance—to translate them, as it were, into the accurate expressions of literal life ”

“ The suspected substance is mixed with some potassa, and is then agitated with ether; a strip of white unsized paper is next several times moistened with the solution, and when dry it is re-moistened with hydrochloric acid, and exposed to the steam of hot water. The paper assumes a red colour, more or less deep, if opium is present.
Uses, &c. Opium is one of the most valuable substances employed in medicine. In small doses it acts as a powerful and diffusible stimulant, in somewhat larger ones it is narcotic, and in excessive doses it proves an active narcotic poison. ”

“ Opium is somewhat uncertain in its action; some persons being able, sometimes from idiosyncrasy, but more frequently from previous indulgence in it, to take a much larger dose than others. The smallest quantity which is said to have proved fatal with an adult is 4 grains of the crude opium. In contrast with this may be quoted the statement of Dr Garrod, of a young man who not only swallowed 60 gr. of Smyrna opium night and morning, but very frequently, in addition to this, 1 oz. to 11⁄2 oz. of laudanum during the day. ”