Opium

“ 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. ”

“ For opium (like the bee, that extracts its materials indiscriminately from roses and from the soot of chimneys) can overrule all feelings into a compliance with the master key. Some of these rambles led me to great distances: for an opium-eater is too happy to observe the motion of time. ”

“ With opium-dens all over the place, with exquisite opium-pipes and all the coquetries of opium-trays and other accessories in the houses of the rich, how is it that we all give warning to a servant when we hear that he has taken to opium? ”

“ I knew that he had made use of opium irregularly and at considerable intervals from the year 1804 to 1812, and that during this time opium had not become a daily necessity; that in the year 1813 he had become a confirmed opium-eater, "of whom to ask whether on any particular day he had or had not taken opium, would be to ask whether his lungs had performed respiration, or the heart fulfilled its functions;" ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As it is our aim to cure the opium-eater by bringing to bear upon his most complicated of all difficulties every means which has proved effectual in the treatment of any one of its particulars, however caused in other instances, we ask no questions of any appliance regarding its nativity, but take from the empiric whatever he has stumbled on of value as freely as the worthiest discoveries of the philosopher from him. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Opium is very ponderous; of a close and compact texture; rather moist; and of a deep brown colour. It emits a faint smell, and has a very bitter acrid taste: the best sort is of a moderate firmness, possessing a very powerful odour, and a bitter, disagreeable flavour. This narcotic drug is at present greatly esteemed; and, whether used in the extract made into pills, or in the liquid form of Laudanum, it is one of the most valuable medicines. Being a very powerful antidote, as well as a remedy for procuring sleep and mitigating pain, it is but too often abused. ”

“ 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 opium-eater will not regard as amiss some few suggestions as to the mode in which his habit may most easily be abandoned. The best advice that can be given—the only advice that will ever be given by an opium-eater—is, never to begin the habit. The objection at once occurs, both to the medical man and to the patient suffering from extreme nervous disorder, What remedy then shall be given in those numerous cases in which the protracted use of opium, laudanum, or morphine is found necessary? ”

“ The man had exhausted all that opium could give him; and now, flattery past, the strong one kept his goods in peace. When the most powerful alleviative known to medical science has bestowed the last Judas kiss which is necessary to emasculate its victim, and, sure of the prey, substitutes stabbing for blandishment, what alleviative, stronger than the strongest, shall soothe such doom? I may give chloroform. ”

“ A man who has eaten much more than half a hundredweight of opium, equivalent to more than a hogshead of laudanum, who has taken enough of this poison to destroy many thousand human lives, and whose uninterrupted use of it continued for nearly fifteen years, ought to be able to say something as to the good and the evil there is in the habit. ”

“ Opium.—Good opium in a concrete state should be of a blackish brown colour, of a strong fetid smell, a hard viscous texture, and heavy; and when rubbed between the finger and thumb, it is perfectly free from roughness or grittiness. This drug is liable to great adulteration, being frequently vitiated with cow-dung, or a powder composed of the dry leaves and stalks of the poppy, the gum of the mimosa, meal and other substances. The flavour alone indicates the goodness of opium in a liquid state. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Death would follow sooner from want of opium than it would from want of food. Seventy-two hours’ abstinence from opium would, I think, prove fatal in my case; and I believe that I would die by the expiration of that time. It may be impossible to conceive, without actual experience, the singular effect opium has upon the system in making itself a necessity. Being no physician, I am unable to give a technical description of that effect, but, with the reader’s indulgence, I shall try, however, to describe it in my own language. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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 the majority of cases I have found an old habitué's daily portion to exceed three, or the equivalent of that dose in crude opium or morphia; making seventy-two grains of the gum or twelve of its most essential alkaloid. In one most interesting case I found a man who having begun on the first of January with one half a grain of sulphate of morphia for disease, at the end of March was, to all appearance, as hopeless an opium-eater as ever lived, taking thirty-two grains of the salt per day in the form of Magendie's Solution. ”

“ Here, invigorated by the mountain breezes, or absorbed in his books and the beautiful scenery, the far-famed Opium-eater made a sudden descent from three hundred and twenty grains (eight thousand drops) per diem of his favourite drug to forty grains, and found himself, Mr Payn says, in the novel position of a man with opium to give away. ”

“ 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 practitioner who treats opium patients needs that science as much as any one interested in whatsoever branch of nervous therapeutics. The battery in the hands of a scientific man is one of our most powerful adjuncts throughout every stage of treatment, both of opium-eating and its sequelae. Paralysis following the habit, and persistent long after its abandonment, I have cured by it when all other means failed. ”

“ First, then, it is not so much affirmed as taken for granted, by all who ever mention opium, formally or incidentally, that it does or can produce intoxication. Now, reader, assure yourself, meo perieulo, that no quantity of opium ever did or could intoxicate. As to the tincture of opium (commonly called laudanum) that might certainly intoxicate if a man could bear to take enough of it; but why? Because it contains so much proof spirit, and not because it contains so much opium. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 ”

“ All opium has a peculiar narcotic odour and a sharp bitter taste.
Chemical Composition—Poppy-juice like analogous vegetable fluids is a mixture of several substances in variable proportion. With the commoner substances which constitute the great bulk of the drug we are not yet sufficiently acquainted. [Pg 56]
In the first place (independently of water) there is found mucilage distinct from that of gum arabic, also pectic matter, [249] and albumin. These bodies, together with unavoidable fragments of the poppy capsules, probably amount on an average to more than half the weight of the opium. ”

“ It is astonishing to any one accustomed to dealing only with the prostration of ordinary disease to see to what an extremity the opium-eater will bear to be reduced—what an extent of muscular debility he will even thrive under. If we look at him closely, we will see through all his pallor a healthy texture of skin—in all his languor a soundness of vital operation which stands to his account for more valid strength, than if he could lift all the weights of Dr. ”

“ I here reckon twenty-five drops of laudanum as equivalent to one grain of opium, which I believe is the common estimate. However, as both may be considered variable quantities (the crude opium varying much in strength, and the tincture still more) , I suppose that no infinitesimal accuracy can be had in such a calculation. Tea-spoons vary as much in size as opium in strength. Small ones hold about one hundred drops—so that eight thousand drops are about eighty times a tea-spoonful. ”