Volume 74 / Part 2 — PART II.

In a previous Number we treated of Tobacco and the Hop, the two narcotics of the most general and acknowledged use among our British population. But there are many others in extensive use in foreign countries, which, though not of so much immediate interest to us in their social relations, are yet of even higher interest in their general, physiological, and psychological bearings. Among these are opium, hemp, coca, the red-thorn apple, the betel-nut, the Siberian fungus, and several others, which we now propose to consider in their order.

III. The Poppy and Opium.—The use of the poppy, as a giver of sleep and a soother of pain, has been familiar from the earliest periods. This is partly shown by the names—poppy in English and papaver in Latin—said to have been given to the plant because it was commonly mixed with the food of young children (pap or papa) to ease pain and secure sleep. In this country the chief use of the poppy is as a medicine. The Tartars of the Caucasus, who, though they profess Mahomedanism, yet drink wine publicly, make it very heady and inebriating, by hanging the unripe heads of poppies in the casks while the fermentation is going on; and in the coffeehouses of the cities of Persia a decoction of poppies is sold, called kokemaar, which is drunk scalding hot. Before it begins to operate, the drinkers quarrel with and abuse each other, but without coming to blows; and afterwards, as the drug takes effect, make peace again. One utters high-flown compliments, another tells stories; but all are extremely ridiculous both in their words and actions.—Tavernier.

But it is the concrete juice of the

The Elements of Materia Medica and Therapeutics. By Jonathan Pereira, M.D., F.R.S., &c. Third Edition. London, 1850.

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.

Travels in Peru during the years 1838–1842. By Dr J. L. Von Tschudi. Translated from the German by Thomasina Ross. London, 1847.

poppy-head that is generally and extensively employed as a narcotic indulgence. The dried juice is called by the Persians afioun, and by the Arabs aphioum, and hence our name opium.

Numerous as are the substances included in the enlarged list of drugs and medicines of the present day, opium is still the most important of them all. It is obtained by making incisions into the capsules or seed-vessels of the common white poppy (Papaver somniferum), when they are nearly ripe, allowing the milky juice which exudes to thicken upon the capsules for twenty-four hours, and then scraping it off. The best opium of commerce is a soft unctuous mass of a reddish or blackish brown colour, a waxy lustre, a strong disagreeable odour, and a bitter, acrid, nauseous taste, which remains long in the mouth. It is collected chiefly in Asiatic Turkey, in Persia, and in India. That which is most esteemed in the European markets comes from Smyrna. The most extensively used in Eastern countries is that which is grown in India. The maximum produce of good opium in our Indian possessions is stated to be 41 lb. per acre, and the average from 20 to 25 lb.—Meyen.

When used as a narcotic indulgence, opium is swallowed either in bulk in the form of pills, or in tinctures—such as our common laudanum—or it is smoked in minute pipes after the manner of tobacco. The first practice prevails most, we believe, in Mahomedan countries, especially Turkey and Persia; the second among Christian nations; and the third in China, and the islands of the Indian Archipelago. In preparing it for smoking, the Chinese extract from the Indian opium all that water will dissolve—generally from one-half to three-fourths of its weight—dry the dissolved extract, and make it into pills of the size of a pea. One of these pills they put into a short tiny pipe, often made of silver, inhale a few puffs at a time, or one single long puff, and return the smoke through the nostrils and ears, till the necessary dose has been taken.

In Borneo and Sumatra finely-chopped tobacco is mixed with the moist extract till it absorbs the whole, and the mixture is made into pills about the size of a pea. At convivial parties a dish of these peas is brought in along with a lamp, when the host takes a pipe, puts in one of the pellets, takes two or three long whiffs, returning the smoke through his nostrils, and, if he be an adept, through his eyes and ears. He then passes the pipe round the company, each of whom does the same with the same pipe; and so they continue smoking till all are intoxicated.

Used in any of these three ways, its sensible effects are nearly the same, varying of course with the quantity taken, with the constitution of the taker, and with the frequency of its previous use. The essential and primary action of the drug is upon the nervous system.

When it is taken in a moderate dose, the results of this action are, that

“The mind is usually exhilarated, the ideas flow more quickly, a pleasurable or comfortable condition of the whole system is experienced, which it is difficult to describe. There is a capability of greater exertion than usual, and hence it is taken as a restorative by such persons as the Tartar couriers, who travel for many days and nights continuously, and with great speed. These exciting effects are succeeded by a corresponding depression. The muscular power is lessened, and the susceptibility to external impressions. A desire for repose ensues, and a tendency to sleep. The mouth and throat become dry meanwhile, the thirst is increased, hunger diminished, and constipation succeeds.”

When large doses are taken, all these effects are heightened in proportion. The period of depression, which almost always succeeds the excitement at first produced by opium, comes on more quickly the larger the dose; the prostration of energy degenerates into stupor, with or without dreams; the pulse becomes feeble, the muscles exceedingly relaxed, and if enough has been taken, death ensues.

In small doses, opium acts in a similar way to our wines and spirituous liquors; and it is as a substitute for these that the Chinese use it. Like them, also, its effects diminish by use, and therefore those who take it for the purpose of producing a pleasurable excitement must gradually increase the dose. The Turkish opium-eaters generally begin with doses of from half a grain to two grains a-day, and gradually increase the quantity till it amounts to 120 grains, or sometimes more. The effect shows itself in one or two hours after it has been taken, and lasts for five or six. In those accustomed to take it, it produces a high degree of animation, which the Theriakis (opium-eaters) represent as the summit of happiness.

Dr Madden thus describes his own sensations when under the influence of the drug, in one of the coffeehouses at Constantinople:—

“I commenced with one grain. In the course of an hour and a half it produced no perceptible effect. The coffeehouse-keeper was very anxious to give me an additional pill of two grains, but I was contented with half a one; and in another half hour, feeling nothing of the expected reverie, I took half a grain more, making in all two grains in the course of two hours. After two hours and a half from the first dose, my spirits became sensibly excited; the pleasure of the sensation seemed to depend on a universal expansion of mind and matter. My faculties appeared enlarged; everything I looked at seemed increased in volume; I had no longer the same pleasure when I closed my eyes which I had when they were open; it appeared to me as if it was only external objects which were acted on by the imagination, and magnified into images of pleasure: in short, it was ‘the faint exquisite music of a dream’ in a waking moment. I made my way home as fast as possible, dreading at every step that I should commit some extravagance. In walking, I was hardly sensible of my feet touching the ground; it seemed as if I slid along the street, impelled by some invisible agent, and that my blood was composed of some etherial fluid, which rendered my body lighter than air. I got to bed the moment I reached home. The most extraordinary visions of delight filled my brain all night. In the morning I rose pale and dispirited; my head ached; my body was so debilitated that I was obliged to remain on the sofa all day, dearly paying for my first essay at opium-eating.”^[38]

The effects of opium upon the system of the healthy are generally esteemed to be eminently prejudicial. Not only is an indulgence in the use of opium held to be criminal in itself, because of the evil consequences which are supposed to follow it, but it is esteemed a criminal act to make the procuring of it easy, and thus indirectly to minister to its more extensive consumption.

The opinion is now, however, beginning to prevail among medical men, that opium taken in moderation, even for a serious of years, is not necessarily injurious to health. Like spirituous liquors and tobacco, it acts as a sure poison when taken immoderately, but the moderate enjoyment of any of the three has not been proved to be either generally or necessarily, and upon all constitutions, attended by ill effects. It may be that the temptation to excess in the case of opium is greater, and that the habitual users of it are less frequently able to resist its seductive influence. But even this, as a physiological question, has by no means been satisfactorily established, and we must be cautious in pushing our conclusions farther than known facts will carry us.

Upon confirmed opium-eaters, however, as the irreclaimable are called, the evil effects of the drug are both undoubted and extremely melancholy.

“A total attenuation of body, a withered yellow countenance, a lame gait, a bending of the spine, frequently to such a degree as to assume a circular form, and glassy deep-sunken eyes, betray the opium-eater at the first glance. The digestive organs are in the highest degree disturbed; the sufferer eats scarcely anything, and has hardly one evacuation in a week. His mental and bodily powers are destroyed—he is impotent.

“When the baneful habit has become confirmed, it is almost impossible to break it off. His torments when deprived of the stimulant are as dreadful as his bliss is complete when he has taken it. Night brings the torments of hell, day the bliss of paradise; and after long indulgence, he becomes subject to nervous pains, to which opium itself brings no relief. He seldom attains the age of forty, if he have begun the practice early.”—Oppenheim.

“The coffeehouses,” says Dr Madden, “where the Theriakis, or opium-eaters, assemble, are situate in a large square; and on a bench outside the door they await the wished-for reveries, which present to their glowing imagination the forms of the celestial houris, and the enjoyments of their own paradise in all its voluptuousness. I had heard so many contradictory reports of the sensations produced by this drug, that I resolved to know the truth, and accordingly took my seat in the coffeehouse with half a dozen Theriakis. Their gestures were frightful; those who were completely under the influence of the opium talked incoherently, their features were flushed, their eyes had an unnatural brilliancy, and the general expression of their countenances was horribly wild. The effect is usually produced in two hours, and lasts four or five; the dose varies from three grains to a drachm. I saw one old man take four pills, of six grains each, in the course of two hours: I was told he had been using opium for five-and-twenty years; but this is a very rare example of an opium-eater passing thirty years of age, if he commence the practice early. The debility, both moral and physical, attendant on its excitement is terrible; the appetite is soon destroyed, every fibre in the body trembles, the nerves of the neck become affected, and the muscles get rigid: several of these I have seen in this place at various times, who had wry necks and contracted fingers; but still they cannot abandon the custom; they are miserable till the hour arrives for taking their daily dose; and when its delightful influence begins, they are all fire and animation. Some of them compose excellent verses, and others address the bystanders in the most eloquent discourses, imagining themselves to be emperors, and to have all the harems in the world at command.”—Madden, i. p. 23.

Similar effects are described as resulting from the smoking of opium to excess in China; and the drinking of laudanum in large quantities in England is equally pernicious in its consequences.

The use of this drug, as a narcotic indulgence, appears to be on the increase among the European populations generally. Among the less provident, especially of the working classes in our own large manufacturing towns, the use of laudanum as a care-dispelling, happiness-giving potion—often as a dispeller of hunger—is said to be greatly extending. If so, we should expect that among us, as among the Turks and Chinese, opium will find many who are unable to resist its seductive allurements, and whom it will drag into the extreme of mental and bodily misery.

Of its powers of seduction, indeed, even over the less delicate and susceptible organisation of our northern European races, and of the absolute slavery to which it can reduce even the strongest minds among us, we have two remarkable examples in the celebrated Coleridge, and in the author of the English Opium-Eater. For many years Coleridge was a slave to opium, and the way in which he became addicted to it is thus described by himself, in a letter dated April 1814:—

“I was seduced into the accursed habit ignorantly. I had been almost bedridden for many months with swellings in my knees. In a medical journal I unhappily met with an account of a cure performed in a similar case (or what appeared to me so), by rubbing in laudanum, at the same time taking a given dose internally. It acted like a charm—like a miracle. I recovered the use of my limbs, of my appetite, of my spirits, and this continued for near a fortnight. At length the unusual stimulus subsided, the complaint returned, the supposed remedy was recurred to—but I cannot go through the dreary history. Sufficient to say, that effects were produced which acted on me by terror and cowardice of pain and sudden death, not (so help me God) by any temptation of pleasure, or expectation or desire of exciting pleasurable sensations. On the contrary, the longer I abstained, the higher my spirits were, the keener my enjoyments—till the moment, the direful moment arrived, when my pulse began to fluctuate, my heart to palpitate, and such a dreadful falling abroad, as it were, of my whole frame, such intolerable restlessness and incipient bewilderment, that in the last of my several attempts to abandon the dire poison, I exclaimed in agony which I now repeat in seriousness and solemnity, ‘I am too poor to hazard this.’”^[39]

He subsequently put himself into the hands of a medical man when at a friend’s house in Bristol; and while he pretended to be gradually lessening the dose under medical instructions, and while his friends thought he was absolutely cured by being brought down to twenty drops a-day, he was all the while obtaining laudanum secretly, and drinking it in large doses as before!

How his moral sense must have been overborne, and by how powerful a fascination, before he could have stooped to such degrading deception! And how fierce his self-upbraidings must have been, when he could add in the same letter from which the above extract is taken: “There is no hope. O God, how willingly would I place myself under Dr Fox in his establishment; for my case is a species of madness, only that it is a derangement, an utter impotence of the volition, and not of the intellectual faculties. You bid me rouse myself. Go bid a man, paralytic in both arms, to rub them briskly together, and that will cure him. ‘Alas!’ he would reply, ‘that I cannot move my arms is my complaint and my misery.’”

And his misery he still further paints in a letter, dated June of the same year: “Conceive a poor miserable wretch, who for many years has been attempting to beat off pain, by a constant recurrence to a vice that reproduces it. Conceive a spirit in hell employed in tracing out for others the road to that heaven from which his crimes exclude him! In short, conceive whatever is most wretched, helpless, and hopeless, and you will form as tolerable a notion of my state as it is possible for a good man to have.”^[40]

And yet Coleridge lived twenty years after this letter was written, conquered the evil habit, and enjoyed, it is to be hoped, much happiness, as he wrote many noble works.

Coleridge speaks of his attempts to give up the indulgence. The following graphic passage describes the horrors undergone by Mr de Quincey, in his efforts to abandon the practice:—

“Opium, therefore, I resolved wholly to abjure, as soon as I should find myself at liberty to bend my undivided attention and energy to this purpose. It was not, however, till the 24th of June last (1822) that any tolerable concurrence of facilities for such an attempt arrived. On that day I began my experiment, having previously settled in my own mind that I would not flinch, but ‘would stand up to the scratch’ under any possible ‘punishment.’ I must premise that about 170 or 180 drops had been my ordinary allowance for many months; occasionally I had run up as high as 300, and once nearly to 700: in repeated preludes to my final experiment I had also gone as low as 100 drops, but had found it impossible to stand it beyond the fourth day, which, by the way, I have always found more difficult to get over than any of the preceding three. I went off under easy sail—130 drops a-day for three days; on the fourth I plunged at once to 80. The misery which I now suffered ‘took the conceit out of me’ at once; and for about a month I continued off and on about this mark: then I sunk to 60; and the next day to—none at all. This was the first day for nearly ten years that I had existed without opium. I persevered in my abstinence for ninety hours—i. e., upwards of half a week. Then I took—ask me not how much. Say, ye severest, what would you have done? Then I abstained again; then took about twenty-five drops; then abstained—and so on.

“Meantime the symptoms which attended my case for the first six weeks of the experiment were these—enormous irritability, and excitement of the whole system; the stomach, in particular, restored to a full feeling of vitality and sensibility, but often in great pain; increasing restlessness night and day; sleep—I scarcely knew what it was—three hours out of the twenty-four was the utmost I had, and that so agitated and shallow that I heard every sound that was near me; lower jaw constantly swelling, much ulcerated, and many other distressing symptoms that would be tedious to repeat; amongst which, however, I must mention one, because it had never failed to accompany my attempt to renounce opium—viz., violent sternutation. This now became exceedingly troublesome, sometimes lasting for two hours at once, and returning at least twice or three times a-day. I was not much surprised at this, on recollecting what I had somewhere heard or read, that the membrane which lines the nostrils is a prolongation of that which lines the stomach; whence I believe are explained the inflammatory appearances about the nostrils of dram-drinkers. The sudden restoration of its original sensibility to the stomach expressed itself, I suppose, in this way. It is remarkable, also, that, during the whole period of years through which I had taken opium, I had never once caught cold (as the phrase is), nor even the slightest cough. But now a violent cold attacked me, and a cough soon after. In an unfinished fragment of a letter begun about this time to ——, I find these words——: Do you know Beaumont and Fletcher’s play of Thierry and Theoderet? then you will see my case as to sleep; nor is it much of an exaggeration in other features. I profess to you I have a greater influx of thoughts in one hour at present, than in a whole year under the reign of opium. It seems as though all the thoughts which had been frozen up for a decade of years by opium had now, according to the old fable, been thawed at once, such a multitude stream in upon me from all quarters. Yet such is my impatience and hideous irritability, that for one which I detain and note down fifty escape me: in spite of my weariness from suffering and want of sleep, I cannot stand still or sit for two minutes together. ‘I nunc et versus tecum meditare canoros.’”^[41]—Confessions—Appendix.

It was not so much by the pleasure it gave, as by the tortures connected with the attempt to abjure it, that in both these cases opium kept its firmest hold. But both men finally triumphed over it, though after tortures which few will consent to undergo, and with frail and shattered bodies:—

“I triumphed: but think not, reader, that therefore my sufferings were ended. Nor think of me as of one sitting in a dejected state. Think of me as of one, even when four months had passed, still agitated, writhing, throbbing, palpitating, shattered; and much in the situation of him who has been racked, as I collect the torments of that state from the affecting account of them by William Lithgow, the most innocent sufferer of the times of James I. Meantime, I derived no benefit from any medicine, except one prescribed for me by an Edinburgh surgeon of great eminence—ammoniated tincture of valerian.”—Confessions.

After a seventeen years’ use, and an eight years’ abuse of its powers, he ceased to consume the drug, but he probably still feels the effects of its long use.

Much uncertainty exists as to the extent to which the use of laudanum really prevails among our healthy adult population. According to De Quincey, the opium-eaters were already numerous thirty years ago. “Of this,” he says, “I became convinced several years ago, by computing at that time the number of those in one small class of English society (the class of men distinguished for talents or of eminent station) who were known to me, directly or indirectly, as opium-eaters: such, for instance, as the eloquent and benevolent ——; the late Dean of ——; Lord ——; Mr ——, the philosopher; a late under-secretary of state (who described to me the sensation which first drove him to the use of opium in the very same words as the Dean of ——; viz., ‘that he felt as though rats were gnawing and abrading the coats of his stomach’); Mr ——, and many others hardly less known, whom it would be tedious to mention.” He adds, also, that about the same time he learned in Manchester that “on a Saturday afternoon the counters of the druggist were strewed with pills of one, two, or three grains, in preparation for the known demand of the evening. The immediate occasion of the practice was the lowness of wages, which at that time would not allow them to indulge in ale or spirits; and wages rising, it may be thought that this practice would cease. But as I do not readily believe that any man, having once tasted the divine luxuries of opium, will afterwards descend to the gross and mortal enjoyments of alcohol, I take it for granted—

‘That those eat now, who never ate before,

And those who always ate, now eat the more.’”

In regard to the intensity and suddenness of the positive enjoyment which the uninitiated derive from the first use of opium, the experience of De Quincey is very instructive. Like Coleridge, he took it first to dispel pain. He had been affected for three weeks with excruciating rheumatic pains in the head and face, when he was advised to try laudanum, and forthwith purchased some at a druggist’s shop.

“Arrived at my lodgings, it may be supposed that I lost not a moment in taking the quantity prescribed. I was necessarily ignorant of the whole art and mystery of opium-taking; and what I took, I took under every disadvantage. But I took it, and in an hour, oh, heavens! what a revulsion! what an upheaving, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit! what an apocalypse of the world within me! That my pains had vanished was now a trifle in my eyes. This negative effect was swallowed up in the immensity of those positive effects which had opened before me—in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed. Here was a panacea—a φαρῳακον νήπενθες for all human woes. Here was the secret of happiness about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages at once discovered! Happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat pocket: portable ecstasies might be had corked up in a pint-bottle; and peace of mind could be sent down in gallons by the mail-coach.”

Those who understand best and feel most for the sorrows and pains of the poverty-stricken humbler classes of every pursuit, would feel no surprise on learning that the seductions which the above passage describes had led away many of them into the habitual and intemperate use of opium. To live in pain and privation from day to day, to suffer from the agonies of old remembrances, or the fears of future individual and family griefs, and to have a key to paradise at hand! Who can wonder that the key is used, or would exercise severity towards him who uses it? We must add to the health, and comfort, and peace of mind of the tempted, before we exchange compassion or forbearance for reproach.

But accurate statistical information is still wanting to prove that the habit of opium-eating has really extended in any great degree among our full-grown healthy labouring population, either in town or country. Isolated cases of a melancholy kind do now and then occur, and loose conjectural statements are made as to the prevalence of the practice in this district or that, but we are unwilling to admit the wide prevalence of the custom without the most trustworthy testimony. A child died, for example, from the effects of opium in September (1853) at Boxworth in Cambridgeshire, the mother, because it was unwell, having placed a piece of crude opium in its mouth to suck. To the announcement of this fact in the newspapers, it was added, “that the mother and her family are all opium-eaters, and, though labouring people, spend four shillings a-week on the drug!” This statement suggests the idea that the habit may prevail extensively in the district, a conclusion which may in reality do injustice to an industrious peasantry. We refuse to adopt it, therefore. It lays, we think, a moral obligation upon the professional men of the county to collect information and make known the truth; and all who feel an interest in the moral reputation of our labouring people should reject such inferences to their prejudice, in the absence of accurate knowledge, which it ought not to be difficult for certain parties to obtain.

But another form of the opium evil has been shown, upon unquestionable evidence, extensively to prevail. In the large manufacturing towns of Lancashire it is a common thing for mothers who work in the factories to put out their children to nurse, and it is equally common for the nurses to dose the children with opium for the purpose of keeping them quiet or of setting them to sleep. It was stated by the Rev. Mr Clay, that in the town of Preston alone, in 1843, “upwards of sixteen hundred families were in the habit of using Godfrey’s Cordial, or some other equally injurious compound,” and that in one of the burial clubs in that town, “sixty-four per cent of the members die under five years of age.”^[42] The obvious conclusion is, that the fatality among the children is connected with the use of the drug.

A writer in the Morning Chronicle of the 4th of January 1850 thus describes the effects which this use of opium produces upon the health of the children:—

“The consequences of this system of drugging are suffusion of the brain, and an extensive train of mesenteric and glandular diseases. The child sinks into a low torpid state, wastes away to a skeleton, except the stomach, producing what is known as pot-belly. One woman said, ‘The sleeping stuff made them that they were always dozing, and never cared for food. They pined away. Their heads got big, and they died.’”

It cannot be denied, therefore, that in one melancholy form at least the evils of opium-eating are visible amongst us. And it is curious that this should be the very form of drugging from which the poppy is said to have derived its name. The diffusion of knowledge among the, it may be not unfeeling, mothers of the factory districts, is one of the most likely ways to remove these evils.

It is impossible to arrive at anything like an approximate idea of the quantity of opium consumed by the different nations of the world. Meyen asserts that the quantity consumed by the Malays of the Indian Archipelago, in Cochin-China and Siam, as well as India and Persia, is so immense that, if we could obtain an exact statement of it, the amount would be quite incredible. The Rajpoots and other Hindoo tribes present opium at their visits and entertainments, with the same familiarity as the snuff-box is presented in Europe. In some countries it is even given to the horses, to excite them to greater exertions. “A Cutchee horseman shares very honourably his store of opium with his horse, which then makes an incredible stretch, though wearied out before.”^[43]

In India at least six and a half millions of pounds of opium are annually bought by the East India Company from the native growers, and manufactured into a marketable condition. To produce this quantity will require upwards of three hundred thousand acres of land. It yields a revenue to the Company of three and a half millions sterling, and is for the greatest part exported.

As to China, we know that, in the season 1837–8, it imported from India three millions of pounds, and the importation from that country has probably increased considerably since that time. To this importation must also be added the opium which China receives by land from the countries which border it towards the west. The consumption of China at the present moment is probably not less than four or five millions of pounds’ weight, having a market value of as many pounds sterling. In the same year (1837–8) India exported about a million and a half of pounds to the islands of the Indian Archipelago and other places.

The consumption of the United Kingdom is of course trifling when compared with this, but it is greatly on the increase. Thus, the quantity imported into Great Britain in 1839 was only 41,000 pounds, while in 1852 it amounted to 114,000 pounds; or, it has increased nearly three times within fifteen years. This implies either the application of the drug to new purposes, or a greatly increased demand for the uses to which it was formerly applied.

It is to be observed, however, as a matter of comfort, that we are not to expect either in Christian Europe or in America to see the consumption of opium ever become so universal as in Mahometan countries, where the use of wine is forbidden to the true believer. So long as a freedom of choice is allowed to the people, or a moral compulsion only is exercised over them, there is little fear of their becoming generally addicted to opium. Prohibit the use of fermented liquors by law, and we may hope to increase largely the consumers of this drug. Morehead mentions a young lady of his acquaintance who, being prevented by her friends from indulging in ardent spirits, had accustomed herself to swallow an ounce of crude opium, with as much ease and indifference as a boy would eat as much liquorice.^[44] We apprehend something of this sort from the strict enforcement of the Maine Law in North America; for although the constitution of our Transatlantic connections has considerably altered, especially in the oldest states, since they crossed the sea, still the universal craving exists among them, and if it is denied gratification in one form, it will seek for it in another.

In regard to its chemical history, opium is probably the best known of all the vegetable extracts or inspissated juices used in medicine. It has been the subject of numerous and elaborate experimental and analytical investigations, and the results of these fill many interesting pages in our newest systems of organic chemistry.

How very complicated a substance even the purest opium is, the general reader will infer from the formidable list of peculiar principles which have been found in it. Besides familiar substances, such as gum, mucilage, resin, fat, caoutchouc, &c., it contains morphine, narcotine, codeine, narceine, thebaine, opianine, meconine, pseudomorphine, porphyroxine, papaverine, and meconic acid—eleven peculiar organic compounds, which occur in greater or less quantity in nearly every sample of pure opium!

Of all these, the most active is that now almost universally known under the name of morphine or morphia. Of this invaluable medicine the best qualities of opium contain as much as ten per cent. It is colourless, void of smell, and nearly insoluble in water, but possesses an exceedingly bitter unpleasant taste, and what are called by chemists alkaline properties. It is powerfully narcotic and poisonous, and is described by some as producing upon the system all the effects of the natural opium. This, however, is not generally the case; and hence it has not, we believe, been anywhere attempted to substitute this pure chemical compound—the chemical composition of which is fixed, and the physiological effects constant and certain—for the crude and uncertain opium, in the production of pleasureable excitement and gratification. And the reason of this obviously is, that the full and peculiar effect of the natural drug is due to the combined and simultaneous action of all the numerous substances it contains. Each of these modifies the effect which would be produced by any one of the others taken singly—as the attraction of each planet modifies the course which would be taken by every one of the others, were it the only one which revolved round the sun. It is from the result of all these conjoined actions that the singular pleasure of the opium-consumer is derived.

At least three of the constituents of opium which have been named above are known to be narcotic and poisonous. These are morphine, codeine, and thebaine. The special action of the other substances upon the system is still unknown or undecided. Indeed, it is a remarkable thing in chemico-physiological history, that, long as opium has been known, extensively as it has been, and still is used, both as a medicine and a luxurious indulgence, and numerous as are the opinions in regard to its mode of action which have been promulgated by medical authorities, we are still so unable to say what is the true action of this drug, that, in the words of Dr Pereira, “we shall save ourselves much time and useless speculation by at once confessing our ignorance on this point.” So far does physiology appear still to lag behind, when our chemistry is tolerably advanced.

It is no doubt the complicated nature of the problem which renders the physiological solution so difficult. Nearly a dozen different substances are mixed up and given at once. Not only do these act in different ways upon the same individual, but each of them probably acts in a somewhat different way upon each different patient, according to his natural constitution, and the state of his health. Is it wonderful that, out of these multiplied sources of diversity, numerously varied phases should appear in the character of its action, and numerous opinions consequently be formed as to the way in which its effects are produced?

Besides, it is a matter of interest, both in connection with this point and with the general chemical history of opium, that the proportions of the several ingredients which are known to be active, vary very much in different samples of the drug. The locality or country in which the plant is grown, the peculiarities of the season during which the opium is collected, and the state of ripeness of the plant—the way in which the juice is dried, and subsequently prepared for the market, and the variety of poppy from which it is obtained,—all these circumstances influence the proportions of its constituents, and consequently modify the action of the mixed substance upon the human system. The Smyrna opium is generally considered the best in the European market, but even in this the morphia varies between four and fourteen per cent. Bengal opium differs from that of Turkey and Egypt, in containing more narcotine in proportion to the morphia. Generally, also, the Indian and Persian samples yield less morphia than those of Turkey.

This latter fact shows that, though it is in warm climates that opium is chiefly collected and used, yet that mere warmth of climate, whatever may be its other effects upon the white poppy, does not alone cause the juice of its capsules to be rich in morphia; and this is supported further by the statement of some English experimenters, that British-grown opium contains more morphia than that of commerce, as well as by the results of French experiments, which showed the presence of 16 to 28 per cent of morphia in some opiums collected in France. These facts are of considerable scientific interest; but they are not likely to lead to any practical results of importance to the rural economy at least of this country. Our poppy plants are probably too slow in their growth, and possess too little juice or succulence, to yield a satisfactory return to the opium-gatherer—were the uncertainty of the climate and the dearness of labour not alone sufficient to preclude the idea of our entering into competition with the Eastern producers of the drug. A different opinion, however, is entertained in France, where the most recent experiments profess to show that the variety which is there cultivated for its seed may be so treated as to yield a harvest of opium at an expense which need not exceed one-fourth of the present market price of the drug, while the seed which ripens uninjured will pay all the ordinary cost of culture; and from these results it is argued, that in the collecting of opium there is the prospect of great advantage to the agriculture of France.

There are three other circumstances in connection with the chemico-physiological history of opium, which will be interesting to the general reader. These are—

First, That its exciting effect is more conspicuous upon some races of men than upon others. This is said to be especially the case with the negroes, the Malays, and the Javanese. “The latter,” says Lord Macartney, “under an extraordinary doze of opium, become frantic as well as desperate. They acquire an artificial courage; and, when suffering from misfortune and disappointment, they not only stab the objects of their hate, but sally forth to attack in like manner every person they meet, till self-preservation renders it necessary to destroy them.” They shout, as they run, Amok, amok, which means “kill, kill;” and hence the phrase, running a-muck. Captain Beeckman was told of a Javanese who ran a-muck in the streets of Batavia, and had killed several people, when he was met by a soldier, who ran him through with his pike. But such was the desperation of the infuriated man, that he pressed himself forward on the pike, until he got near enough to stab his adversary with a dagger, when both expired together. On the Malays its effects are described to be very nearly the same. They remind one of the excitement said to have formerly prevailed in a less fatal form at Donnybrook and other Irish fairs, when an unusual dose of poteen had been administered to the boys.

The influence of race, as it affects the physiological action either of substances introduced into the stomach, or of ideas presented to the mind, is the same in kind as the influence of individual constitution. It is only greater in degree, and startles us sometimes because of the extent to which it appears exaggerated. The influence of constitution is recognised and considered in every dose of medicine we take or administer, and in the way in which good or evil tidings are communicated to our friends. We more rarely allow for differences of race in dealing with foreign nations, or in criticising their behaviour and actions under given circumstances.

In the Malays and Javanese we have the excitable temperament, accompanied by the unrestrained outward forms of expression, which are characteristic of Eastern nations. What affects us Saxons lightly or slowly, touches them instantly, and penetrates deep. The emotions which, when awakened, we are accustomed to restrain and hide, they openly and vividly display, and by indulgence heighten often to an overpowering degree. The negro tribes partake of a similar organisation. “In this respect,” says Mrs Beecher Stowe, “they have an Oriental character, and betray their tropical origin. Like the Hebrews of old, and the Oriental nations of the present day, they give vent to their emotions with the utmost vivacity of expression, and their whole bodily system sympathises with the movements of their minds. When in distress, they actually lift up their voices to weep, and ‘cry with an exceeding bitter cry.’ When alarmed, they are often paralysed, and rendered entirely helpless.” This susceptibility affects all their relations both to living and dead things. Opium affects different individuals among them in different ways, as it does the different individuals of European races, but upon all it produces those more marked and striking effects which, among ourselves, we only see in rare instances, and in persons of uncommonly nervous temperament.

Second, It is a curious fact, that the active narcotic ingredients of opium often escape the decomposing action of the digestive and other organs. They pass unchanged into the milk of the nurse who uses it, and have been known to poison the infant suckled by a female who had been dozing herself largely with opiates. The odour of the drug is to be perceived in the breath and in the perspiration; and morphia and meconic acid are known occasionally to escape through the kidneys, and have been found in the fluid excretions. This character the active ingredients of opium possess in common with many other narcotic principles, such as those of the deadly nightshade, the henbane, the thorn-apple, the intoxicating fungus, and with many other substances used in medicine.—Pereira, p. 102.

Third, Opium, as is well known, gradually loses its effect upon the habitual consumer, so that the dose must be increased from time to time, if the influence of the drug is to be maintained. But at length, even this resource fails the inveterate opium-eaters of Constantinople, and no increase of dose will procure for them the desired enjoyment, or even relieve them from bodily pain. In this emergency, they have recourse to the poisonous corrosive sublimate. Mixing at first a minute quantity of this substance with their daily dose of opium, they increase it by degrees, till they reach the limit of ten grains a-day, beyond which it is usually unsafe to pass. This mixture acts upon their long-tortured frames, when neither of the ingredients, taken alone, will either soothe or exhilarate. But the use of the new medicine only protracts a little longer the artificial enjoyment, which has become a necessary of life, finally bringing to a more miserable termination the career of the debilitated and distorted Theriaki.

We have said that, in moderate doses, opium acts in a similar way to our wines and spirituous liquors, and that it is as a substitute for these that the Chinese use it. By this we do not mean that its physiological effects are precisely the same, although the main purpose for which they are used by many—that of a care-dispeller—may be the same. On the contrary, there are many points of difference in the effects which alcohol and opium respectively produce. The following somewhat coloured and imaginative picture represents their relative effects on the constitution of the English opium-eater:—

“Crude opium, I affirm peremptorily, is incapable of producing any state of body at all resembling that which is produced by alcohol; and not in degree only incapable, but even in kind. It is not in the quantity of its effects merely, but in the quality, that it differs altogether. The pleasure given by wine is always mounting, and tending to a crisis, after which it declines; that from opium, when once generated, is stationary for eight or ten hours: the first—to borrow a technical distinction from medicine—is a case of acute, the second of chronic pleasure; the one is a flame, the other a steady and equable glow. But the main distinction lies in this, that whereas wine disorders the mental faculties, opium, on the contrary (if taken in a proper manner), introduces amongst them the most exquisite order, legislation, and harmony. Wine robs a man of his self-possession; opium greatly invigorates it. Wine unsettles and clouds the judgment, and gives a preternatural brightness, and a vivid exaltation to the contempts and the admirations, the loves and the hatreds, of the drinker; opium, on the contrary, communicates serenity and equipoise to all the faculties, active or passive; and with respect to the temper and moral feelings in general, it gives simply that sort of vital warmth which is approved by the judgment, and which would probably always accompany a bodily constitution of primeval or antediluvian health. Thus, for instance, opium, like wine, gives an expansion to the heart and the benevolent affections; but then with this remarkable difference, that, in the sudden development of kind-heartedness which accompanies inebriation, there is always more or less of a maudlin character, which exposes it to the contempt of the bystander. Men shake hands, swear eternal friendship, and shed tears, no mortal knows why; and the sensual creature is clearly uppermost. But the expansion of the benigner feelings, incident to opium, is no febrile access, but a healthy restoration to that state which the mind would naturally recover upon the removal of any deep-seated irritation of pain that had disturbed and quarrelled with the impulses of a heart originally just and good.... Wine constantly leads a man to the brink of absurdity and extravagance; and, beyond a certain point, it is sure to volatilise and to disperse the intellectual energies; whereas opium always seems to compose what had been agitated, and to concentrate what had been distracted. 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; that is, the moral affections are in a state of cloudless serenity; and over all is the great light of the majestic intellect.”

After this highly-coloured eulogium upon the comparative virtues of opium and alcohol, drawn from personal experience, who could blame us were we at once to propose the establishment of a national opium-eating, distillery-burning society, and, Father Mathew-like, should take up our staff, and preach everywhere the exceeding virtues of the inestimable drug, and propose for universal imitation the admirable example of the silver-piped Celestials? But it may occur to the reader, as it does to ourselves, that the English opium-eater himself was brought to death’s door by the use of his favourite drug, and was compelled to abandon his beloved enjoyment. For the present, therefore, we refrain, and recommend in preference our own bitters practice. Keep your morphia bottle carefully stowed away till a new attack of toothache or sciatica comes on, and your laudanum as a ready friend should the prevailing epidemic approach you.

And yet even grave and matter-of-fact men are to be found—persons who have had large experience of the use of opium in Eastern countries—who not only pronounce the use of the drug as a narcotic indulgence to be far from an unmitigated evil, but who especially prefer its general use to that of alcoholic drinks. Among these we may mention Dr Eatwell, of the East India Company’s service, whose knowledge of the history and action of opium is acknowledged to be most extensive. The deliberate opinion of this gentleman is deserving of much attention; and he argues the case as follows:—

“It has been too much the practice with those who have treated this subject to content themselves with drawing the sad picture of the confirmed debauchee, plunged in the last stage of moral and physical exhaustion; and having taken this exception as the premises of their argument, to proceed at once to involve the whole practice in one sweeping condemnation. But this is not the way in which the subject can be fairly treated. As rational would it be to paint the horrors of delirium tremens, and upon that evidence to condemn at once the entire use of alcoholic liquors. The question to be determined is not, what are the effects of opium used in excess, but what are its effects on the moral and physical constitution of the mass of individuals who use it habitually, and in moderation, either as a stimulant to sustain the frame under fatigue, or as a restorative and sedative after labour, bodily or mental. Having passed three years in China, I can affirm thus far, that the effects of the abuse of the drug do not come very frequently under observation, and that, when cases do occur, the habit is frequently found to have been induced by the presence of some painful chronic disease, to escape from the suffering of which the patient has fled to this resource. That this is not always, however, the case, I am perfectly ready to admit, and there are doubtless many who indulge in the habit to a pernicious extent, led by the same morbid influences which induce men to become drunkards in even the most civilised countries; but these cases do not, at all events, come before the public eye. As regards the effects of the habitual use of the drug on the mass of the people, I must affirm that no injurious results are visible. The people are a muscular and well-formed race, the labouring portion being capable of great and prolonged exertion under a fierce sun, in an unhealthy climate. Their disposition is cheerful and peaceable, and quarrels and brawls are rarely heard even amongst the lower orders; whilst in general intelligence they rank deservedly high amongst Orientals.

“I conclude, therefore, with observing that the proofs are still wanting to show that the moderate use of opium produces more pernicious effects upon the constitution than the moderate use of spirituous liquors; whilst, at the same time, it is certain that the consequences of the abuse of the former are less appalling in their effects upon the victim, and less disastrous to society at large, than the consequences of the abuse of the latter. Compare the furious madman, the subject of delirium tremens, with the prostrate debauchee, the victim of opium; the violent drunkard with the dreamy sensualist intoxicated with opium. The latter is, at least, harmless to all except his wretched self, whilst the former is but too frequently a dangerous nuisance, and an open bad example to the community at large.”^[45]

It strikes us that the tone of this passage is that of an apologist for an evil practice, rather than of a defender of a good one. But we leave our readers to form their own opinion upon the point not unably argued by Dr Eatwell. It may be that the ideas we have generally entertained in this country, hitherto, as to the necessarily evil effects of the use of opium as an indulgence, may be only unfounded prejudices. They may have arisen from drawing too hasty and general conclusions from the manifest evils of extreme cases; and it is possible that more knowledge may compel us materially to alter our present opinions. Meantime the medical missionaries inform us that the confirmed opium-consumers of China use daily from 30 to 200 grains of the pure extract, which is equal to twice as much of the crude opium. We might expect, therefore, a more frequent recurrence of melancholy spectacles arising from the use of the drug, than by the testimony of Dr Eatwell is really the case.

IV. Hemp.—As a general rule, little is popularly known in northern Europe of the use of hemp as a narcotic indulgence; and yet in the East it is as familiar to the sensual voluptuary as the opium we have been considering.

Our common hemp (Cannabis sativa), so extensively cultivated for its fibre, is the same plant with the Indian hemp, Cannabis Indica, which from the remotest times has been celebrated among Eastern nations for its narcotic virtues. The plant came to Europe from Persia, and is supposed by many to be a native of India; but, like tobacco and the potato, it has a wonderful power of adapting itself to differences in soil and climate. Hence it is cultivated in northern Russia—whence our manufacturers obtain large supplies of its valuable fibre—in Northern America, on the plains of India and Arabia, in Africa, from its northern to its southern extremities, and throughout the whole of Europe. But in hot climates the fibre degenerates in quality, while the narcotic ingredients increase in quantity, and in apparent strength.

In the sap of this plant, probably in all countries, there exists a peculiar resinous substance in which the narcotic quality resides. In northern climates the proportion of this substance is so small as hitherto to have escaped notice. In the warmer regions of the East, however, it is so abundant as to exude naturally from the flowers, from the leaves, and from the bark of the young twigs. This is another of the many interesting facts now known, which show the influence of climate in modifying the chemical changes that take place in the interior of plants, and the nature and proportions of the several substances which are produced by these changes. We have already seen how the numerous constituents of opium vary with the locality in which it is collected.

In India the resinous exudation of the hemp plant is collected in various ways. In Nepaul it is gathered by the hand in the same way as opium. This variety is very pure and much prized. It is called Momeea, or waxen Churrus. It has a fragrant narcotic odour, and a slightly hot, bitterish, and acrid taste. In Central India, men covered with leathern aprons run backwards and forwards through the hemp fields, beating the plants violently. By this means the resin is detached and adheres to the leather. This is scraped off, and is the ordinary churrus of commerce, the chirs of Caubul. It does not bring so high a price as the momeea. In other places the leathern aprons are dispensed with, and the resin is collected on the naked skins of the coolies. In Persia it is collected by pressing the resinous plant on coarse cloths, and afterwards scraping the resin from these, and melting it in a little warm water. The churrus of Herat is considered as one of the best and most powerful varieties of the drug.

The plant itself is often collected and dried for the sake of the resin it contains. The whole plant collected when in flower, and dried without the removal of the resin, is called Gunjah. The larger leaves and capsules without the stalks form bang, subjee, or sidhee, which is less esteemed than the gunjah.^[46]

The gunjah, when boiled in alcohol, yields as much as one-fifth of its weight of resinous extract, and hence this method of preparing the drug in a pure state has been recommended as the most efficient and economical.

Among the ancient Saracens, the modern Arabs, in some parts of Turkey, and generally throughout Syria, the preparations of hemp in common use were, and are still, known by the names of haschisch, hashash, or husheesh. The most common form of haschisch, and that which is the basis of all others, is prepared by boiling the leaves and flowers of the hemp with water to which a certain quantity of fresh butter has been added, evaporating the decoction to the thickness of a syrup, and then straining it through cloth. The butter thus becomes charged with the active resinous principle of the plant, and acquires a greenish colour. This preparation retains its properties for many years, only becoming a little rancid. Its taste, however, is very disagreeable, and hence it is seldom taken alone, but is mixed with confections and aromatics, camphor, cloves, nutmegs, mace, and not unfrequently ambergris and musk, so as to form a sort of electuary. The confection used among the Moors is called el mogen, and is sold at an enormous price. Dawamese is the name given by the Arabs to that which they most commonly use. This is frequently mingled, however, with other substances of reputed aphrodisiac virtues, to enable it to minister more effectually to the sensual gratifications, which appear to be the grand object of life among many of the Orientals.

The Turks give the names of Hadschy Malach and Madjoun to the compositions they use for purposes of excitement. According to Dr Madden, the madjoun of Constantinople is composed of the pistils of the flowers of the hemp plant ground to powder, and mixed in honey with powdered cloves, nutmegs, and saffron.

Thus the hemp plant or its products are used in four different forms.

First, The whole plant dried and known by the name of gunjah; or the larger leaves and capsules dried and known as bang, subjee, or sidhee; or the dried flowers, called in Morocco kief, a pipe of which, scarcely the size of an English pipe, is sufficient to intoxicate; or the dried pistils of the flower in the madjoun of the Turks. It is possible that these latter parts of the plant may be peculiarly rich in resin.

Second, The resin which naturally exudes from the leaves and flowers, and is, when collected by the hand, called momeea; or the same beaten off with sticks, and sold by the name of churrus.

Third, The extract obtained by means of alcohol from the gunjah, and which is said to be very active.

Fourth, The extract obtained by the use of butter, which, when mixed with spices, forms the dawamese of the Arabs, and is the foundation of the haschisch of many Eastern countries and districts. Other varieties, however, are in use, under the name of haschisch, one of which consists only of the tops and tender parts of the plants collected after they have been in flower.

The dried plant is smoked, and sometimes chewed, while the resin and resinous extracts are generally swallowed in the form of pills or boluses. The newly-gathered plant and leaves have a rapid and energetic action. Their efficacy diminishes, however, by keeping, which is less the case with the natural resin and the extracts.

In one or other of these forms the hemp plant appears to have been used from very remote times. The ancient Scythians are said by Herodotus to have excited themselves “by inhaling its vapour.” Homer makes Helen administer to Telemachus, in the house of Menelaus, a potion prepared from the Nepenthes, which made him forget his sorrows. This plant had been given to her by a woman of Egyptian Thebes; and Diodorus Siculus states that the Egyptians laid much stress on this circumstance, arguing that Homer must have lived among them, since the women of Thebes were actually noted for possessing a secret by which they could dissipate anger or melancholy. This secret is supposed to have been a knowledge of the qualities of hemp.

It is curious how common and familiar words sometimes connect themselves with things and customs of which we know absolutely nothing. The word assassin—a foreign importation, it is true, but long naturalised among us—is of this kind. M. Sylvester de Sacy, the well-known Orientalist, says that this word was derived from the Arabic name of hemp. It was originally used in Syria to designate the followers of “the old man of the mountain,” who were called Haschischins, because among them the haschisch was in frequent use, especially during the performance of certain of their mysterious rites. Others say that, during the wars of the Crusaders, certain of the Saracen army, intoxicated with the drug, were in the habit of rushing into the camps of the Christians, committing great havoc, being themselves totally regardless of death; that these men were known as hashasheens, and that thence came our word assassin. The Oriental term was probably in use long before the time of the Crusades, though the English form and use of the word may have been introduced into Europe at that period.

Nor is the use of hemp less extended than it is ancient. All over the East, and in Mahomedan countries generally, it is consumed. In Northern Africa it is used largely by the Moors. In Southern Africa, the Hottentots use it under the name of Dacha, for purposes of intoxication; and when the Bushmen were in London, they smoked the dried plant in short pipes made of the tusks or teeth of animals. What is more astonishing, when we consider what broad seas intervene, even the native Indians of Brazil know its value, and delight in its use; so that over the hotter parts of the globe generally, wherever the plant produces in abundance its peculiar narcotic principle, its virtues may be said to be known, and more or less extensively made use of.

Its effects on the system, therefore, we must suppose, are very agreeable. In India it is spoken of as the increaser of pleasure, the exciter of desire, the cementer of friendship, the laughtermover, and the causer of the reeling gait,—all epithets indicative of its peculiar effects. Linnæus describes its power as “narcotica, phantastica, dementens, anodyna et repellens;” while in the words of Endlicher, “Emollitum exhilarat animum, impotentibus desideriis tristem, stultam lætitiam provocat, et jucundissima somniorum conciliat phantasmata.”

The effects of the churrus or natural resin have been carefully studied in India by Dr O’Shaughnessy. He states that when taken in moderation it produces increase of appetite and great mental cheerfulness, while in excess it causes a peculiar kind of delirium and catalepsy. This last effect is very remarkable, and we quote his description of the results of one of his experiments with what is considered a large dose for an Indian patient:—

“At two P.M. a grain of the resin of hemp was given to a rheumatic patient; at four P.M. he was very talkative, sang, called loudly for an extra supply of food, and declared himself in perfect health. At six P.M. he was asleep. At eight P.M. he was found insensible, but breathing with perfect regularity, his pulse and skin natural, and the pupils freely contractile on the approach of light. Happening by chance to lift up the patient’s arm, the professional reader will judge of my astonishment when I found it remained in the posture in which I placed it. It required but a very brief examination of the limbs to find that by the influence of this narcotic the patient had been thrown into the strangest and most extraordinary of all nervous conditions, which so few have seen, and the existence of which so many still discredit—the genuine catalepsy of the nosologist. We raised him to a sitting posture, and placed his arms and limbs in every imaginable attitude. A waxen figure could not be more pliant or more stationary in each position, no matter how contrary to the natural influence of gravity on the part! To all impressions he was meanwhile almost insensible.”

This extraordinary influence he subsequently found to be exercised by the hemp extract upon other animals as well as upon man. After a time it passes off entirely, leaving the patient altogether uninjured.

In this effect of the hemp in India we see a counterpart of many of the wonderful feats performed by the fakeers and other religious devotees of that country. It indicates probably the true means also by which they are enabled to produce them. How much power a little knowledge gives to the dishonest and designing in every country over the ignorant and unsuspecting masses!

The effects of the haschisch of the Arabians, which probably do not differ from those of hemp in any of its forms, have been described to us from his own personal experience by a French physician, M. Moreau. When taken in small doses, its effect is simply to produce a moderate exhilaration of spirits, or at most a tendency to unseasonable laughter. Taken in doses sufficient to induce the fantasia, as its more remarkable effects are called in the Levant, its first influence is the same as when taken in a small dose; but this is followed by an intense feeling of happiness, which attends all the operations of the mind. The sun shines upon every thought that passes through the brain, and every movement of the body is a source of enjoyment. M. Moreau made many experiments with it upon his own person—appears indeed to have fallen into the habit of using it even after his return to France—and he describes and reasons upon its effects as follows:—

“It is really happiness which is produced by the haschisch; and by this I mean an enjoyment entirely moral, and by no means sensual, as might be supposed. This is a very curious circumstance, and some remarkable inferences might be drawn from it. Among others, for example, that every feeling of joy and gladness, even when the cause of it is exclusively moral—that those enjoyments which are least connected with material objects, the most spiritual, the most ideal—may be nothing else but sensations purely physical developed in the interior of the system, in the same way as those which are produced by means of the haschisch. At least, in so far as relates to that of which we are internally conscious, there is no distinction to be made between these two orders of sensations, in spite of the diversity of causes to which they are due. For the haschisch-eater is happy, not like the gourmand, or the famished man when satisfying his appetite, or the voluptuary in the gratification of his amative desires,—but like him who hears tidings which fill him with joy, or like the miser counting his treasures, the gambler who is successful at play, or the ambitious man who is intoxicated with success.”^[47]

This glowing description of the effects of the haschisch, though given by one who had often used it, is yet on that very account, like the picture of the opium-eater, open to suspicion. We feel as if it were intended as a kind of excuse or justification of the indulgence on the part of the writer. Yet apart from this, the metaphysical question raised by M. Moreau is a very interesting one. To pursue it here, as a general question, would be out of place. We may observe, however, that it is intimately connected not only with the peculiar action exercised over the mind by each of the narcotics we are now considering, but with the probable cause of all those mental aberrations we include under the general term—insanity. Can we produce, for example, virtual insanity—imaginary happiness,^[48] imaginary misery, or the most truth-like delusions—by introducing into the stomach, and thence into the blood which is passing through the hair-like blood-vessels of the brain, a quantity of a foreign body too minute to be recognised by ordinary chemical processes; and may not real natural insanity, in any of its forms, be caused by the natural production within the system itself of minute quantities of analogous substances possessing similar virtues? And, if so produced, will our future chemistry teach us to remove the mental disease, by preventing the production of the cause, or by constantly neutralising its effects? How important are these facts and considerations to a true pathology of insanity in general, and to every rational attempt to bring it, in all its phases, within the domain of the healing art!

When first it begins to act, the peculiar effects of the haschisch may be considerably diminished or altogether checked by a firm exertion of the will, “just as we master the passion of anger by a strong voluntary effort.” By degrees, however, the power of controlling at will and directing the thoughts diminishes, till finally all power of fixing the attention is lost, and the mind becomes the sport of every idea which either arises within itself, or is forced upon it from without.

“We become the sport of impressions of every kind. The course of our ideas may be broken by the slightest cause. We are turned, so to speak, by every wind. By a word or a gesture, our thoughts may be successively directed to a multitude of different subjects with a rapidity and lucidity which are truly marvellous. The mind becomes possessed with a feeling of pride, corresponding to the exaltation of its faculties, which it is conscious have increased in energy and power. It will be entirely dependent on the circumstances in which we are placed, the objects which strike the eyes, the words which fall on our ears, whether the most lively sentiments of gaiety or of sadness shall be produced, or passions of the most opposite character excited, sometimes with extraordinary violence. Irritation may rapidly pass into rage, dislike into hatred and desire for revenge, and the calmest affection into the most transporting passion. So fear becomes terror, courage is developed into rashness which nothing checks, and which seems unconscious of danger, and the most unfounded doubt and suspicion becomes a certainty.

“The mind has a tendency to exaggerate everything, and the slightest impulse carries it along. Hence those who make use of the haschisch in the East, when they wish to give themselves up to the intoxication of the fantasia, withdraw themselves carefully from everything which could give to their delirium a tendency to melancholy, or excite anything but feelings of pleasurable enjoyment. They profit by all the means which the dissolute manners of the East place at their disposal. It is in the midst of the harem, surrounded by their women, under the charm of music and of lascivious dances performed by the almees, that they enjoy the intoxicating dawamese; and with the aid of superstition, they find themselves almost transported to the scene of the numberless marvels which the Prophet has collected in his paradise.”^[49]

The errors of perception to which the patient is liable during the period of fantasia, are remarkably experienced in regard to time and place. Minutes seem hours, and hours are prolonged into years, till at last all idea of time seems obliterated, and the past and the present are confounded together. Every notion, in this curious condition, seems to partake of a certain degree of exaggeration. One evening, M. Moreau was traversing the passage of the Opera when under the influence of a moderate dose of haschisch. He had made but a few steps when it seemed to him as if he had been there for two or three hours; and as he advanced the passage seemed interminable, its extremity receding as he pressed forward.^[50]

The effect produced by hemp in its different forms varies, however, both in kind and in degree, with the individual to whom it is administered. Its general effect upon Orientals is of an agreeable and cheerful character, exciting them to laugh, dance, and sing, and to commit various extravagances—acting as an aphrodisiac, and increasing the appetite for food. Some, however, it renders excitable and quarrelsome, and disposes to acts of violence. It is from the extravagant behaviour of individuals of this latter temperament that the use and meaning of our word assassin have most probably arisen. There are some rare individuals, however, according to Dr Moreau, on whom the drug produces no effect whatever—upon whom, at least, doses are powerless which are usually followed by well-marked phenomena, as is the case with opium, long use making larger doses necessary. To some even a drachm of the churrus is considered a moderate dose, though sufficient to operate upon twenty ordinary men.

Upon Europeans generally, at least in Europe, its effects have been found to be considerably less in degree than upon Orientals. “In India, Dr O’Shaughnessy had seen marked effects from half a grain of the extract, or even less, and had been accustomed to consider one grain and a half a large dose; in England he had given ten or twelve or more grains, to produce the desired effect.”—(Pereira, p. 1242.) In kind, also, its effects upon Europeans differ somewhat from those produced upon Asiatics. It has never been known, for example, to produce that remarkable cataleptic state, described in a previous page as having been observed in India as the consequence even of a comparatively small dose of the hemp extract.

Of the chemistry of the hemp plant comparatively little is yet known. Had it been as long familiar to Europeans, or used as extensively as in the East, it would probably, like opium, have been the subject of repeated chemical investigations.

When distilled with water, the dried leaves and flowers yield a volatile oil in small quantity. The properties of this volatile oil have not been studied. It is not supposed, however, to have any important connection with the remarkable effects of the plant upon the living animal.

But the whole hemp plant is impregnated, as we have seen, with a resinous substance, in which its active virtues reside. When collected as it naturally exudes, this resin forms the churrus of India. It is extracted when the leaves are boiled with butter to form the basis of the haschisch, or when the dried plant is treated with alcohol to obtain the hemp extract. It is soft, dissolves readily both in alcohol and ether, and is separated from these liquids in the form of a white powder when the solutions are mixed with water. It has a warm, bitterish, acrid, somewhat balsamic taste, and a fragrant odour, especially when heated.

Both the resin which naturally exudes from the hemp plant, and the extract it yields to spirituous liquids, are probably mixtures of several substances possessed of different properties and relations to animal life. The remarkably complex composition of opium justifies such an opinion. And the analogy of the same substance makes it probable that the produce of the plant will differ in different localities and countries—so that the churrus of India, and the haschisch of Syria, may produce very different effects on the same constitution. But these points have not as yet been investigated either chemically or physiologically. This substance, therefore, holds out the promise of a rich and interesting harvest to future experimenters.

The extract of hemp differs considerably in its effects from opium. It does not lessen, but rather excites the appetite. It does not occasion nausea, dryness of the tongue, constipation, or lessening of the secretions, and is not usually followed by that melancholy state of depression to which the opium-eater is subject. It differs also in causing dilatation of the pupil, and sometimes catalepsy, in stilling pain less than opium does, in less constantly producing sleep, in the peculiar inebriating quality it possesses, in the phantasmata it awakens, and in its aphrodisiac effects. To the intellectual activity imparted by opium, it adds a corresponding sensitiveness and activity of all the feelings and of the senses, both internal and external. It seems, in fact, a source of exquisite and peculiar enjoyment, with which, happily, we are in this part of the world still altogether unacquainted.

It is impossible to form any estimate of the quantity of hemp, of hemp resin, or of the artificial extract, which are used for purposes of indulgence. It must, however, be very large, since the plant is so employed, in one form or another, by probably not less than two or three hundred millions of the human race!

V. Coca.—When the Spanish conquerors overcame the Indians of the hilly country of Peru, they found among them plantations of an herb called coca, and the custom extensively prevalent of chewing its leaves during frequent short periods of repose specially set apart for the purpose. So universal, indeed, was the use of it, that it was the common money or medium of exchange of Peru, and after the introduction of gold and silver money, the principal article of traffic. The practice of using it was already ancient among the Indian races, and its origin is lost in the mists of remote antiquity. It continues equally prevalent to the present day among the Indian inhabitants of Bolivia and Peru. Coca is in reality the Narcotic of the Andes, and it is not less interesting than hemp, either in its social or in its physiological relations.

The Erythroxylon coca^[51] is a bush which attains the height of six or eight feet, and resembles the blackthorn in its small white flowers and bright green leaves. It grows wild in many parts of Bolivia, but that which is used by the people is chiefly the produce of cultivation. Like our common thorn, it is raised in seed-beds, from which it is planted out into regular coca plantations. It is extensively cultivated in the tropical valleys of the eastern slopes of the Andes, in Upper and Lower Peru. The steep sides of these valleys, below the level of 8000 feet, are often covered with plantations of coca, arranged in terraces like the vine-culture of Tuscany and the Holy Land. The leaves, when ripe enough to break on being bent, are collected and dried in the sun. In favourable localities, the bushes yield three, and even four, crops of leaves in a year. When nearly dried, or exposed to the sun, they emit an odour similar to that of new-made hay, in which much mellilot, or sweet-scented vernal grass, is contained; and they give a headache to new-comers, as haymaking does to some persons among ourselves. These dried leaves form the coca of commerce. When of good quality, they are of a pale-green colour. Dampness causes them to become dark coloured, in which state they are less esteemed; and if they heat through dampness, they become altogether useless. Their taste is not unpleasant; it is slightly bitter and aromatic, and resembles that of green tea of inferior quality. It is more piquant and agreeable when a sprinkling of quicklime or plant ashes is chewed along with it.

The use of this herb among the Indians dates, as we have said, from very remote periods. Its cultivation was a care of the native government during the reign of the Incas, and it is still to the Indian of the mountains the delight, the support, and in some measure a necessity of his life. He is never seen without the leathern pouch (his chuspa) to contain his coca leaves, and his little gourd-bottle to hold powdered unslacked lime—or, if he is a Bolivian, the alkaline ashes left by the quinoa or the musa root when burned. Always three, and sometimes four times a-day, he rests from his mining or other labour, or pauses in his journey, and lays down his burden to chew in quiet the beloved leaf. When riding, or walking, or labouring, the leaves have little effect. As with opium and hemp, stillness and repose are indispensable to his full enjoyment of the luxury it produces. In the shade of a tree he stretches himself at ease, and from time to time puts into his mouth a few leaves rolled into a ball (an acullico), and after each new supply a little unslacked lime on the end of a slip of wood moistened and dipped into his lime-flask. This brings out the true taste of the leaf, and causes a copious flow of greenish-coloured saliva, which is partly rejected and partly swallowed. When the ball ceases to emit juice it is thrown away, and a new supply is taken. The interval of enjoyment conceded to the labouring Indian lasts from fifteen minutes to half an hour, and is generally wound up by the smoking of a paper cigar. Repeated three or four times a-day, his average consumption is an ounce or an ounce and a half in the twenty-four hours, and on holidays double that quantity. The owners of mines and plantations have long found it for their interest to allow a suspension of labour three times a-day for the chaccar, as it is called; and the Indian speedily quits an employer who endeavours to stint or deprive him of these periods of indulgence. During these periods his phlegm is something marvellous. No degree of urgency or entreaty on the part of his master or employer will move him; while the confirmed coquero, when under the influence of the leaf, is heedless of the thunder-storm which threatens to drown him where he lies, of the roar of approaching wild beasts, or of the smoking fire which creeps along the grass, and is about to suffocate or scorch him in his lair.

The Indians of the Peruvian Andes are subject to fits of melancholy, or are generally perhaps of a gloomy temperament. “In their domestic relations,” says Von Tschudi, “the Indians are unsocial and gloomy. Husband, wife, and children live together with but little appearance of affection. The children seem to approach their parents timidly, and whole days sometimes elapse without the interchange of a word of kindness between them. When not engaged in out-door work, the Indian sits gloomily in his hut, chewing coca and brooding silently over his own thoughts.”—Travels, p. 481.

It does not appear, however, that the coca adds to his gloom; on the contrary, he takes it to relieve himself for the time from the peculiarities of his temperament. Silence and abstraction are necessary to the enjoyment, but the use of it makes him cheerful; and it is to the unhappy, often oppressed, and always poor Peruvian, the source of his highest pleasures. It has come down to him as a relic of the ancient enjoyments of his people, and during the phantasy it produces, he participates in scenes and pleasures from which in common life he is altogether excluded. Dr Weddell very sensibly remarks, that, as a relic of the past, he attaches “superstitious ideas to the coca, which must triple, in his imagination, the benefits he receives from it,” and that its value to him is further enhanced by its being the “sole and only distraction which breaks the incomparable monotony of his existence.”

We have no detailed account, by an actual chewer of the leaf, of the special effects which it produces; but these must be very seducing, since, though long stigmatised, and still very generally considered as a degrading, purely Indian, and, therefore, despicable vice, many white Peruvians at Lima and elsewhere retire daily at stated times to chew the coca; and even Europeans in different parts of the country have fallen into the habit. A confirmed chewer of coca is called a “coquero,” and he is said to become occasionally more thoroughly a slave to the leaf than the inveterate drunkard is to spirituous liquors.

Sometimes the coquero is overtaken by a craving which he cannot resist, and he betakes himself for days together to the silence of the woods, and there indulges unrestrained in the use of the weed. Young men of the best families in Peru become sometimes addicted to it to this extreme degree of excess, and are then considered as lost. Forsaking cities and the company of civilised men, and living chiefly in woods or in Indian villages, they give themselves up to a savage and solitary life. Hence the term, a white coquero, has there something of the same evil sense as irreclaimable drunkard has with us.

The chewing of coca gives “a bad breath (abominable, according to Weddell), pale lips and gums, greenish and stumpy teeth, and an ugly black mark at the angles of the mouth. The inveterate coquero is known at the first glance. His unsteady gait, his yellow skin, his dim and sunken eyes encircled by a purple ring, his quivering lips, and his general apathy, all bear evidence of the baneful effects of the coca juice when taken in excess.”—Von Tschudi, p. 450.

Its first evil effect is to weaken the digestion; it then gradually induces a disease locally named the opilacion. Biliary affections, with all the painful symptoms which attend them in tropical climates, and, above all, gall stones, are frequent and severe. The appetite becomes exceedingly uncertain, till at length the dislike to all food is succeeded by an inordinate appetite for animal excrement. Then dropsical swellings and boils come on; and the patient, if he can get it, flies to brandy for relief, and thus drags out a few miserable years, till death relieves him.^[52]

This description is sufficiently repulsive, but it is only the dark side of the picture. A similar representation could be truthfully made of the evil effects of wine or beer in too numerous cases, without thereby implying that these liquors ought either to be wholly forbidden, or of our own accord entirely given up. “Setting aside all extravagant and visionary notions on the subject, I am clearly of opinion,” says Von Tschudi, “that the moderate use of coca is not merely innoxious, but that it may even be very conducive to health. In support of this conclusion, I may refer to the numerous examples of longevity among Indians who, almost from the age of boyhood, have been in the habit of masticating coca three times a-day. Cases are not unfrequent of Indians attaining the great age of 130 years; and these men, at the ordinary rate of consumption, must in the course of their lives have chewed not less than 2700 lb. of the leaf, and yet have retained perfect health.” Even the Indian coquero, who takes it in excess, reaches the age of fifty years. It is consumed both more abundantly, however, and with less baneful results, in the higher Andes than in the lower and warmer regions.

It is certain that the Peruvian Indians ascribe to it the most extraordinary virtues. They regard it even at the present day as something sacred and mysterious. This impression they have inherited as a fragment of their ancient religion, for in all the ceremonies, whether warlike or religious, of the times of the Incas, the coca was introduced. It was used by the priests either for producing smoke at the great offerings to the gods, for throwing in handfuls upon the sacrifice, or as the sacrifice itself.

“During divine worship the priests chewed coca leaves, and unless they were supplied with them, it was believed that the favour of the gods could not be propitiated. It was also deemed necessary that the supplicator for divine grace should approach the priests with an acullico in his mouth. It was believed that any business undertaken without the benediction of coca leaves could not prosper, and to the shrub itself worship was rendered. During an interval of more than 300 years Christianity has not been able to subdue this deep-rooted idolatry, for everywhere we find traces of belief in the mysterious powers of this plant. The excavators in the mines of Cerro de Pasco throw masticated coca on hard veins of metal, in the belief that it softens the ore and renders it more easy to work. The origin of this custom is easily explained, when it is recollected that in the time of the Incas it was believed that the cozas, or the deities of metals, rendered the mountains impenetrable if they were not propitiated by the odour of coca. The Indians, even at the present time, put coca leaves into the mouths of dead persons, to secure to them a favourable reception on their entrance into another world; and when a Peruvian Indian on a journey falls in with a mummy, he, with timid reverence, presents to it some coca leaves as his pious offering.”—Von Tschudi, p. 454.

And even Europeans cannot deny that, in addition to the ordinary properties of a narcotic, this leaf possesses two very remarkable properties not known to coexist in any other substance.

First, They lessen, when chewed, the necessity for ordinary food, and not only enable the chewer, as opium does, to put forth a greater nervous energy for a short time, but actually, with the same amount of food, perseveringly to undergo more laborious fatigue or longer-continued labour. With a feeble ration of dried maize, or barley crushed into flour, the Indian, if duly supplied with coca, toils under heavy burdens, day after day, up the steep slopes of the mountain passes, or digs for years in the subterranean mines, insensible to weariness, to cold, or to hunger. He believes, indeed, that it may be made a substitute for food altogether; and an instance given by Von Tschudi seems almost to justify this opinion.

“A cholo of Huari, named Hatan Huamang, was employed by me in very laborious digging. During the five days and nights he was in my service he never tasted any food, and took only two hours’ sleep each night. But at intervals of two and a half or three hours he regularly chewed about half an ounce of coca leaves, and he kept an acullico continually in his mouth. I was constantly beside him, and therefore I had the opportunity of closely observing him. The work for which I engaged him being finished, he accompanied me on a two days’ journey of twenty-three leagues across the level heights. Though on foot, he kept up with the pace of my mule, and halted only for the chaccar. On leaving me he declared he would willingly engage himself again for the same amount of work, and that he would go through it without food, if I would but allow him a sufficient supply of coca. The village priest assured me that this man was sixty-two years of age, and that he had never known him to be ill in his life.”—Von Tschudi, p. 453.

How this remarkable effect of the coca is to be accounted for, in accordance with the received notions as to animal nutrition, it is not easy to see.

Second, Another striking property of this leaf is, that, either when chewed or when taken in the form of infusion, like tea, it prevents the occurrence of that difficulty of respiration which is usually felt in ascending the long and steep slopes of the Cordillera and the Puna.

“When I was in the Puna,” says Von Tschudi, “at the height of fourteen thousand feet above the level of the sea, I drank always, before going out to hunt, a strong infusion of coca leaves. I could then during the whole day climb the heights and follow the swift-footed wild animals, without experiencing any greater difficulty of breathing than I should have felt in similar rapid movements on the coast. Moreover, I did not suffer from the symptoms of cerebral excitement or uneasiness which other travellers have experienced. The reason perhaps is, that I only drank the decoction on the cold Puna, where the nervous system is far less susceptible than in the climate of the forests beneath. However, I always felt a sense of great satiety after taking the coca infusion, and I did not feel a desire for my next meal until after the time at which I usually took it.”

The reason of this action of the leaf is not less difficult to perceive than that of its strength-sustaining capabilities.

When the Spanish conquerors took possession of Peru, the Indians, and all their customs, were treated by them with equal contempt; but everything connected with their religion was especially denounced by the Spanish priests. Hence the use of coca was condemned and forbidden. It was considered worthy the consideration of councils of the church, which denounced it in 1567 as a “worthless substance, fitted for the misuse and superstition of the Indians,” and of the thunders of a royal decree which, in 1569, condemned the idea that coca gives strength as an “illusion of the devil.” But these fulminations were of no avail. The Peruvians still clung to their esteemed national leaf, and the owners of mines and plantations, soon discovering its efficacy in enabling their slaves to perform the heavy tasks they imposed upon them, became its warm defenders. Even churchmen at last came to regard it with indulgence, and, stranger still, to recommend its introduction into Europe.

“One of the warmest advocates of the plant was the Jesuit Don Antonio Julian, who, in a work entitled Perla de America, laments that coca is not introduced into Europe instead of tea and coffee. ‘It is,’ he observes, ‘melancholy to reflect that the poor of Europe cannot obtain this preservative against hunger and thirst; that our working people are not supported by this strengthening plant in their long-continued labours.’ In the year 1793, Dr Don Pedro Nolasco Crespo pointed out in a treatise the important advantages that would be derived from the use of the coca plant, if introduced into the European navies; and he expresses a wish that experiments of its utility in that way could be tried. Though it is not probable that Dr Crespo’s wish will ever be realised, yet there is little doubt that the use of coca as a beverage on board ship would be attended with very beneficial results. It would afford a nutritious refreshment to seamen in the exercise of their laborious duties, and would greatly assist in counteracting the unwholesome effects of salt provisions. As a stimulant, it would be far less injurious than ardent spirits, for which it might be substituted without fear of any of the evil consequences experienced by the coqueros.”—Von Tschudi, p. 456.

It will strike the reader of the present article as somewhat remarkable, that modern, perhaps more impartial and truth-loving inquiry, should strip so many of these narcotic indulgences of the horrid and repulsive aspect they have always hitherto worn. We find now that they have all a fair side as well as a foul, and that it becomes a question for reasonable discussion whether an educated population, trained to the exercise of a reasonable self-control, might not be safely left to avail themselves of the strangely fascinating enjoyments they are capable of affording, without much risk of their becoming the source of any greatly extended after-misery. But when, it may be pertinently asked, can we hope to see the mass of our population so trained to self-denial and self-restraint?