Opium-Eating Teetotallers
74 Art. VII.?
A dark veil of obscurity enshrouds the vice of opium-eating in England. In what class of society must we seek for those most addicted to the pernicious habit ? and to what extent do they yield to the fascinations of the wonderful drug ? Accurate statistics are not easily available. Vast quantities of the opium annually imported into England are undoubtedly consumed in other ways than in the legitimate manufacture of its alkaloid for exportation, the prescriptions of physicians, patent medicines, or the drugging of ales and spirits. Much has been said and written against the facilities for secret potations afforded by grocers’ licenses?bottles of gin, said to be entered as tea or candles?but what about the penny postage facilities for the receipt of opium in the neat disguise of cough lozenges ? The unsuspecting husband or wife would hardly take the trouble to verify on every box the facsimile of the signature as the patentee so earnestly entreats. There is nothing new in Narcotism, for in the East, with the rise of Islamism and the rapid spread of abstinence from alcohol, this vice, which is even more demoralising than drunkenness, became almost universal. The question has often been asked, where do some of the teetotallers get their intense and enthusiastic excitement ? They point us to the delicious water, so rich in animal organisms, as supplied by our water companies, and tell us that the crystal spring suffices for all their needs. It may be well for those teetotallers who exact no pledge against narcotics, to wait and see what increase there may have been in the amount of such drugs* imported into England recently, before too eagerly congratulating themselves upon the temperance of our epoch.
Doubt and darkness have almost always enshrouded the practice of opium consumption; only a few distinguished names, such as W. Wilberforce, Dean Isaac Milner, Coleridge, and De Quincey, have been openly mentioned as opium-eaters; with these very rare exceptions, the practice of the opiumtaker, all the world over?China not excepted?has ever been to keep the habit as secret as possible. And this secresy has been always maintained when its votaries took it in so-called moderation, and even in all the earlier stages ; but when the irresistible craving has been fairly established, then indeed
In 1872 the amount of opium received in this country was 356-211 lb.,
valued at ?361,503.
all sliame at the hideous and unnatural vice disappears, and its devotee becomes lost to all sense of honour, truth, honesty, selfrespect, and self-control; a slave to a tyrant so inexorable, that had his crouching victim any such power of volition left, his first effort to totally cast off the poppy-chains might end in death. This inability to live without it is usual; a new constitutional idiosyncrasy, the second nature, demands continuous relays of the supply ; a sudden imprisonment for theft, or any other opium-produced crime, may end in death from the frightful shock to the constitution on the sudden cessation of the habit. Young, successful, and vigorous men are at first spellbound by opium’s charms, soon to find, as did De Quincey, all its intensely exhilarating influences fade into the dim past, and then they may begin to know what the fearful craving means. As with the excessive indulgence in alcoholic drinks, so with the morbid appetite for opium, the taint must be surely inherited in an impaired power of volition, likely to lead the descendants to weakly yield to that or any similar narcotic fascination, chloral for instance. Although the opium-eater is, as an almost universal rule, a liar, who denies his vice, yet it can be recognised, even in the earlier stages, by a certain expression, or rather cast of countenance, and by the contrast between the dull, unimpressive, sunken, lustreless eye, and the same under the influence of opium, for then its clear, sparkling restlessness tells its own tale to the practised on-looker, though it does not even arouse suspicion in the generality of mankind. There is an unmistakable ” opium look ” alike seen in infants and adults always to be remembered if once learnt, but it cannot well be described.
And when opium gets into the nursery, alas for the moral and intellectual faculties of the infant opium-eater. It may be the very highly-recommended monthly nurse who initiates the tiny atom of humanity into the mysteries of poppy juice in one or other of its multiform combinations. It is ” such a good baby,” passes most of its time in sleep, just as an infant should do. A relative?perhaps struck by something ” uncanny ” in those persistent slumbers?watches, and is at length rewarded by seeing through the crack of a door ajar a linger with powder upon it, stealthily introduced from the nurse’s pocket to the baby’s mouth, this followed by a long death-like sleep. Or, the secret delinquent may be the nurse engaged afterwards for the infant, young, pretty, neat, clean, and orderly. No haggard looks nor sallow countenance, nor dirty, untidy ways, as yet bespeak the trail of the opium serpent. She is sure to be a staunch teetotaller, and much prefers beer-money to any poisonous alcohol. She takes the bright, promising, healthy little one, and a mysterious change soon passes over her infant charge. Weighty words of wise physicians on the moral management of infancy trouble the parents. The baby gets very pale, and white-looking, its slumbers are often unnaturally heavy and prolonged. Few parents are exactly mental philosophers, or, if they are, they are scarcely interested or wise in brain symptoms. Could their eyes be opened they would see strange changes taking place in that very delicate and frail organism, baby’s brain. Opium is working upon it in some marvellous way, and if not saved in time, it will soon sleep on, a long sleep, and need a lower bed than the cot with its daintily belaced draperies that tender mother-fingers put so carefully aside to watch the tiny sleeper. What a bluish pallor of countenance ! How strangely do the scorched and swollen eyelids quiver as it sleeps ! Now one hand twitches, then a slight convulsive movement can be seen in the face; teething, all kinds of infantile ailments, are supposed to amply account for it all. Bye-and-bye there is noticed in the baby’s expression ” a little sly look ” as the servants call it, an almost idiotic look, the parents hardly dare to think, but yet fear. There is no time to be lost, that child must be saved instantly; or over the fibres of the brain which are perchance of an unusually fine texture, a subtle change will but too soon have fatally swept, and a few years hence a drivelling idiot, probably the first ever known in the family, will be all that opium has left of that highly wrought, beautiful organism, and good moral beginning, the heritage from a long line of gifted ancestors. Epilepsy will sometimes more suddenly and visibly show the ruin and the havoc the drug has wrought, but rarely, if ever, does a physician suspect the cause, except in cases where the child dies at once from an overdose, and is seen to be under its influence. The nurse is often an opium-eater or laudanum-drinker herself, with all the moral obliquity of the race, and knows only too well how to time her potion that no doctor may be able to see the baby actually under its effects. It is said that in some of the agricultural districts of England, where laudanum is freely indulged in by teetotallers, and there is a large and steady consumption of crude opium, mothers are less addicted than formerly to the baneful practice of administering it to their children, because more enlightened views are now prevalent upon the subject. It might be well if the wives of our spiritual pastors and masters, officers in the army and navy, and civil servants, would emulate the intelligence of their humbler sisters, and unite to efface from the price lists of their respective stores ” Quietness,” still advertised at tenpence per bottle. The Chinese or Persian mother goes to work in a more open and systematic way. She has no wish to be burdened with too many children ; she knows that all idiots will be kept at the expense of the state, so she uses opium, her infallible recipe for artificially producing idiocy. She begins by giving her infant at a very early age small doses, and gradually increases them, until the development of its mental faculties is safely, surely, and thoroughly arrested, and then hands over the carefully-manufactured idiot to the care of the state. Are English lovers of ” Quietness ” much more tenderhearted ? Wyma.
Disclaimer
The historical material in this project falls into one of three categories for clearances and permissions:
Material currently under copyright, made available with a Creative Commons license chosen by the publisher.
Material that is in the public domain
Material identified by the Welcome Trust as an Orphan Work, made available with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
While we are in the process of adding metadata to the articles, please check the article at its original source for specific copyrights.