The Opium Habit | Page 2

narratives from fellow-sufferers and fellow-victims will
appeal to whatever remains of his hopeful nature, with the assurance
that others who have suffered even as he has suffered, and who have
struggled as he has struggled, and have failed again and again as he has
failed, have at length escaped the destruction which in his own case he
has regarded as inevitable.
The number of confirmed opium-eaters in the United States is large,
not less, judging from the testimony of druggists in all parts of the
country as well as from other sources, than eighty to a hundred
thousand. The reader may ask who make up this unfortunate class, and
under what circumstances did they become enthralled by such a habit?
Neither the business nor the laboring classes of the country contribute
very largely to the number. Professional and literary men, persons
suffering from protracted nervous disorders, women obliged by their
necessities to work beyond their strength, prostitutes, and, in brief, all
classes whose business or whose vices make special demands upon the
nervous system, are those who for the most part compose the fraternity
of opium-eaters. The events of the last few years have unquestionably
added greatly to their number. Maimed and shattered survivors from a
hundred battle-fields, diseased and disabled soldiers released from
hostile prisons, anguished and hopeless wives and mothers, made so by
the slaughter of those who were dearest to them, have found, many of
them, temporary relief from their sufferings in opium.
There are two temperaments in respect to this drug. 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. Those of the latter class, who have already become
enslaved by the habit, will find many things in these pages that are in
harmony with their own experience; other things they will doubtless
find of which they have had no experience. Many of the particular
effects of opium differ according to the different constitutions of those
who use it. In De Quincey it exhibited its power in gorgeous dreams in
consequence of some special tendency in that direction in De Quincey's
temperament, and not because dreaming is by any means an invariable
attendant upon opium-eating. Different races also seem to be
differently affected by its use. It seldom, perhaps never, intoxicates the
European; it seems habitually to intoxicate the Oriental. It does not
generally distort the person of the English or American opium-eater; in
the East it is represented as frequently producing this effect.
It is doubtful whether a sufficient number of cases of excess in
opium-eating or of recovery from the habit have yet been recorded, or
whether such as have been recorded have been so collated as to warrant
a positive statement as to all the phenomena attendant upon its use or
its abandonment. A competent medical man, uniting a thorough
knowledge of his profession with educated habits of generalizing
specific facts under such laws--affecting the nervous, digestive, or
secretory system--as are recognized by medical science, might render
good service to humanity by teaching us properly to discriminate in
such cases between what is uniform and what is accidental. In the
absence, however, of such instruction, these imperfect, and in some
cases fragmentary, records of the experience of opium-eaters are given,
chiefly in the language of the sufferers themselves, that the
opium-eating reader may compare case with case, and deduce from
such comparison the lesson of the entire practicability of his own
release from what has been the burden and the curse of his existence.
The entire object of the compilation will have been attained, if the
narratives given in these pages shall be found to serve the double
purpose of indicating to the beginner in opium-eating the hazardous
path he is treading, and of awakening in the confirmed victim of the
habit the hope that he may be released from the frightful thraldom
which has so long held him, infirm in body, imbecile in will, despairing
in the present, and full of direful foreboding for the future.
In giving the subjoined narratives of the experience of opium-eaters,

the compiler has been sorely tempted to weave them into a more
coherent and connected story; but he has been restrained by the
conviction that the thousands of opium-eaters, whose relief has been
his main object in preparing the volume, will be more benefited by
allowing