Poisoned Sleep | AdventAI

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · May 23, 1878

Poisoned Sleep.

SLEEP is a boon commonly regarded as priceless; but it may be purchased too dearly. Macbeth murdered sleep; a very large and unhappily increasing number of well-meaning but misguided persons poison it. The medical profession has a keen interest in the growing practice of habitual recourse to sleep-potions, because it is with the connivance of the profession, if not under its specific advice, that these soporific poisons are employed. We think the time has come when some strong means should be taken to clear medicine from the reproach of countenancing the lay use of opium, chloroform, chloral, chlorodyne, and the rest of the sleep-producers. The public should be told that they are playing with poison. If they escape a so-called “accident” which ends in sudden death, they are scarcely to be congratulated, since, if the body does not die, the brain is disordered or disorganized, the mind enfeebled, and the moral character depraved, or evils hardly less deplorable than death are entailed. The consideration may be agonizing, but it is urgent. The sleep produced by these narcotics or so-called sedative—let them act as they may “on the nervous system directly” or “through the blood”—is poisoned. Their use gives the persons employing them an attack of cerebral congestion, only differing in amount, not in kind, from the condition which naturally issues in death. There is grave reason to fear that the real nature of the operation by which these deleterious drugs, one and all, bring about the unconsciousness that burlesques natural sleep, is lost sight of, or wholly misunderstood, by those who have free recourse to poisons on the most frivolous pretenses, or with none save the exigency of a morbid habit. Great responsibility rests upon medical practitioners, and nothing can atone for the neglect of obvious duty.—Sel.