Opium smoking

“ The first effect of opium-smoking is to make a man intelligent and amiable. It is for this reason that opium-smoking—so the Chinese explained to us—is used largely in business. When business is difficult, and you cannot get three or four men to agree, the opium pipe is brought out, and after two or three whiffs the cantankerous people are reasonable, and the people whose dignity is hurt are forgiving, and business is easily and rapidly transacted. The next stage of smoking is stupidity. As you watch an opium-smoker in that condition he nods amiably at you with a rather imbecile look. ”

“ The opium smoker cannot work hard: he finds it difficult to apply his mind to a problem or his body to a task. As the habit becomes firmly fastened on him, there is a perceptible weakening of his moral fiber; he shows himself unequal to emergencies which make any sudden demand upon him. If opium is denied him, he will lie and steal in order to obtain it.
Opium smoking is a costly vice. ”

“ To root out in a period of ten years the insidious vice of opium-smoking, which on their own showing has laid its palsied touch upon no less than 40 per cent of a population computed at 400,000,000, is an undertaking which may well stagger the imagination of even the most visionary of moral reformers. ”

“ Smoking seems to be the most stupefying manner in which solid opium can be consumed, the one which acts most powerfully and injuriously upon the brain. But opium-smoking is hardly likely to take a strong hold on English or European taste. A piece of opium no larger than a pea, chopped up and mixed with a large bowlful of tobacco, produces on the veteran tobacco-smoker a nauseating effect powerfully recalling that of the first pipe of his boyhood ”

“ When a man has got himself into this condition, he must have opium, and must have it all the time. I have already pointed out that opium-smoking not only is perhaps the most expensive of the vices, but that, unlike opium-eating, it consumes an immense amount of time. Few smokers can keep slaves to fill their pipes for them, like that wealthy official at Shau-ying. ”

“ The opium-smoker smokes in private with other smokers, and is thus not offensive to other people. He is not injuring non-smokers, or arousing the curiosity of boys, or polluting the atmosphere, or creating a craving in others. In the West the opium habit is generally condemned because the West is able to look with a new and unbiased mind on a drug habit that is not its own.
I consider that cigarette-smoking is the greatest vice devastating humanity to-day, because it is doing more than any other vice to deteriorate the race. ”

“ It has also come to be a custom in some regions, to furnish opium to the guests at weddings, and this may become an item of a very elastic nature. Besides this, a man who smokes opium is naturally incapacitated from taking even ordinary care of the stores under his charge. If he is himself a smoker, and if opium is one of the articles provided for the occasion, it will not be strange if all his opium-smoking comrades embrace the opportunity to visit him, when they must be invited to take a pipe—of course at the expense of the master of ceremonies. ”

“ Opium is largely used by Eastern nations for smoking, and there is great discrepancy of opinion as to the extent to which opium smoking is deleterious. The preponderance of opinion is in favour of the view that opium smoking is a demoralizing, degrading, and pernicious habit, and that its victims are sufferers both in body and mind from its use. ”

“ The anti-opium sentiment is found in the highest official circles, in the army, in the navy, in the schools. Within the past year or so it has been growing steadily stronger. Opium-smoking used to be taken as a matter of course; now, where you find a man smoking too much, you also find a group of friends apologizing for him. I have already explained that opium-smoking is not tolerated in the “new” army. There is now a rapidly growing number of officials and merchants who refuse to employ opium-smokers in any capacity. ”

“ They take from a grain to a grain and a half, divided into two pills, one in the afternoon and one at night. The majority of authorities agree that opium smoking as a habit is much more harmful and attended with more demoralizing influences than opium eating ”

“ Hobson, another medical missionary, and as such entirely averse to the trade, says: “Opium-smoking is not nearly so fatal to life as spirit-drinking is with us; its use is even compatible with longevity.” It is very common to hear Chinese acknowledge that they have smoked opium for ten, twenty, or thirty years. Dr. Hobson mentions one case in which the smoker began at nineteen, and smoked for fifty-one years. [78] Further evidence is surely unnecessary to prove that opium-smoking is not necessarily, nor even [Pg 70] commonly, destructive of life. ”

“ Opium-smoking appears here as elsewhere in China to be becoming yearly a more recognized habit,—almost a necessity of the people. Those who use the drug now do so openly, and native public opinion attaches no odium to its use, so long as it is not carried to excess.... In the city of Amoy, and in adjacent cities and towns, the proportion of opium-smokers is estimated to be from 15 to 20 per cent. of the adult population.... ”

“ This easy accessibility of drugs in medicinal form is more dangerous than moralists care to admit. The reason why opium-smoking has been, up to the present, less prevalent in the United States than in China and some other countries is probably that the preparation of it and the machinery for taking it are not convenient. ”

“ In discussing the evil effects of opium-smoking, the very great value of the drug as a medicine is liable to be forgotten, yet the lives of thousands have been saved by its use under proper control. It has absolutely no rival in its power of giving needful sleep in illness and in relieving pain, whilst in many diseases its effect is of the greatest possible advantage to the patient. ”

“ Let a man once fall into the way of smoking opium, though it be but one pipe, at a certain hour of the day, that pipe will be an absolute necessity, and he takes it, not so much to procure pleasure, as to allay the horribly painful craving from which he suffers. In fact, a man destroys his health by opium smoking in China, much as a drunkard does in England, not so much by taking immoderate doses occasionally, but by making a habit of taking small doses repeatedly. ”

“ Crime too often follows the destitution caused by opium-smoking; for at all costs opium must be had. Thefts, robberies, or even murders may result. The wretched culprit may have to flee from justice, or to make his escape from a neighbourhood which will no longer tolerate him. The very dogs pursue him. Probably the bucket in which the wanderer carries his pipe, and the labourer’s hat slung behind him, are both stolen. Some cave among the hills may shelter him, or the rocks may shield him from the cutting wind.
No. 11.
The downward course of the opium-smoker is now very rapid. ”

“ The habit of opium smoking is easily acquired, and, when acquired, the smoker becomes a slave to its use. There are between two and three hundred of these smoking rooms in Chicago. The number of persons addicted to smoking opium cannot be stated with accuracy. ”

“ Hart, Inspector-General of Chinese Customs, considerably less than one per cent. of the population is addicted to opium-smoking, while those who smoke it to excess are few. More to be feared [pg 208] is the use of opium as a poison, especially among Chinese women. The government raises large sums from the import duty on opium, and tacitly connives at its cultivation in most of the provinces, where the traders and mandarins share between them the profits of this officially prohibited drug. ”

“ There is another danger besides that of an increased production of opium in China itself, which has to be carefully guarded against pari passu with the reduction of the supply of the drug—the danger of abolishing one vice only to make room for a worse. It is well known in the East that where opium-smoking is suppressed, the use of morphia or of some equally deleterious drug is almost certain to take its place, unless the most stringent precautions are adopted to prevent it. ”

“ Those who have not seen the effects of opium smoking, in the eastern world, can hardly form any conception of its injurious results on the health, energies, and lives of those who indulge in it. The debilitating of the constitution, and the shortening of life, are sure to follow, in a few years, after the practice has been commenced; as soon and as certainly if not much more so, than is seen to be the case with those unhappy persons, who are addicted to the use of ardent spirits. ”

“ In the United States the opium-smoker is invariably unworthy. Not long ago the New York police raided the apartment of a physician where were found thirty or forty opium-pipes and more than a hundred pounds of opium, either crude or prepared for smoking. I have known fewer than half a dozen physicians whose drug vice was purely social, however. The victims of drag habit who achieved it through a tendency toward dissipation are almost invariably denizens of the under-world ”

“ Sometimes people smoke in their own houses, and sometimes they resort to horrid places regularly set apart for opium-smoking. In Hong-Kong, where we are going, there will be many an opium-smoker who will buy this drug in quantities when he cannot even afford to purchase clothing. ”

“ Opium, the most powerful narcotic, benumbs the brain into sleep; produces a corresponding reaction, on awakening; shuts up the secretions, except that of the skin, and thus deranges the alimentary functions. The decriers of tobacco will, we conceive, be unable to show that it produces such effects.
The reformers are reduced, then, to the vague generality, that smoking and chewing "affect the nerves." ”

“ Smoking opium became their chief social activity; they gathered together in the one heated room of the house to gossip over their pipes. We smoke tobacco as the Chinese smoke opium, “for company” and in company. Thus one must provide strong reasons to make a man give it up. He will not do so because it costs him something; he expects to pay for his pleasures. When a man has actually gone to pieces, it is comparatively easy to convince him that he ought to give up what is hurting him ”

“ On asking people why they had taken to the drug, they invariably replied that it was for the cure of a pain of some sort—for relieving the suffering. The women often take to it after childbirth, and this is generally what starts them to smoking.
“The wealthier men who smoke opium nearly all day cannot enter another room until this room has first been filled with the fumes of opium. Some one has to go into the room first and smoke a few pipes, so that the air of the room may be in proper condition. ”

“ Some Observations on the Opium Habit.
It is now proper that we should ask the question “Is opium the very dreadful thing it is made out to be?” My answer is, yes and no. Anything immoderately indulged in is bad for one. Over-eating, excess in smoking and drinking, are all bad. There is such a thing as too much of even a good thing. I am prepared to admit that excess in opium is worse than most things; but as a choice between opium and drink, I consider drunkenness to be the greater evil. It may be that it is more common, and therefore responsible for more distress in the world than opium ”

“ Opium is not smoked in the same manner as tobacco. The pipe is a tube of nearly the length and thickness of an ordinary flute. Towards one end of it is fitted a bowl of baked clay or some other material, more or less precious, which is pierced with a hole communicating with the interior of the tube. The opium, which before smoking is in the form of a blackish viscous paste, is prepared in the following manner:—A portion, of the size of a pea, is put on a needle, and heated over a lamp until it swells and acquires the requisite consistence. ”

“ Reason showeth that smoking opium is a kind of insanity, and experience attesteth that the user is completely cut off from the human kingdom. May God protect all against the perpetration of an act so hideous as this, an act which layeth in ruins the very foundation of what it is to be human, and which causeth the user to be dispossessed for ever and ever. For opium fasteneth on the soul, so that the user’s conscience dieth, his mind is blotted away, his perceptions are eroded. It turneth the living into the dead. ”

“ What, then, are the effects of opium-smoking on the Chinese individually and as a nation? Had they been anything like what the anti-opiumists assert they must be, surely the effect would be visible after all these years in an increased death-rate or a decreased birth-rate. Needless to say, no such aggregate result is observable. Where opium is most smoked, there the population is most thriving and industrious, [74] and increases the fastest. “No China resident,” says Dr. ”

“ We are told that thousands of tons are used annually [pg 302] in smoking and chewing in different parts of the world. Over half a million pounds are consumed by the opium eaters of our own country. It is a lust of the flesh and classed among the things which if we do we can never enter heaven. It is because it is a sin that will bar you forever from the land of eternal rest, that prompts us to add a few words of warning.
Like alcohol and tobacco, the word opium does not appear in the Scriptures, but that it is a sinful lust but very few will deny. Opium is the dried juice of the white poppy. ”