Opium-Fearful Facts

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 21, 1875

Opium—Fearful Facts.

Until 1840 our importation of opium did not exceed the proper medicinal demand for the drug. We used in that year about 24,000 pounds of it. In 1870 we imported 154,841 pounds; 1872, over 250,000. The Chinese demand for opium prepared for smoking accounts for about one-eighth of this. Three-eighths are absorbed in prescriptions—prescriptions which are too often recklessly written, as we shall show hereafter. This leaves fifty per cent, or about 125,000 pounds of poison, unaccounted for. The books of wholesale drug houses in the East show heavy sales of opium to the country dealers. The habit of opium-eating seems to prevail chiefly among women. This fact may explain the great percentage of farmers’ wives in lunatic asylums. The author of “The Opium Habit” estimates that there are 80,000 or 100,000 habitual opium eaters in the country. There are somewhat precise returns, however, only from the State of statistics—Massachusetts. The apothecaries in the smaller towns of the commonwealth report an alarming state of things. We subjoin a few notes furnished by different druggists to the Board of Health.

Those addicted to opium are all females.

Several nervous women take opium here.

I think the use of opium has slightly increased, mostly among females.

There are probably half a dozen opium-eaters here, all females but one.

One opium-eater in town—a woman.

The use of opium has greatly increased, especially among women.

The causes of this alarming habit of self-poisoning are several. The taste is often implanted in early infancy by the use of the drugged sirups which foolish mothers give their restless babies. The Massachusetts Board of Health indorses the author of “Opium Habit and Opium Appetite” in his statement that the “basis of what is known as Winslow’s Soothing Sirup is morphia.” A recent analysis of a sample of this medicine gave one grain of the alkaloid to an ounce of the sirup, the dose for an infant, as directed, being four or five times that usually regarded as safe. Another cause is the rashness of physicians in prescribing the drug. Out of fifty apothecaries, fourteen mention this as a great reason of the growth of the habit. The opiate treatment of neuralgia is very common and very mischievous. This disease, by the way, first led DeQuincey to use the deadly drug. The third great cause is the denial of the natural craving for alcohol. Man, balked of one stimulant, takes another. “It is a significant fact that both in England and in this country the abstinence movement was almost immediately followed by an increased consumption of opium. The English importation doubled within five years after the outbreak of the movement. When the teetotalism gained ground in America, our importation, although the price of opium had just increased fifty per cent, rose in proportion of 3.5 to 1.” Still, in his “Therapeutics and Materia Medica,” says, “The habit of opium-chewing has become very prevalent in the British Islands, especially since the use of alcoholic drinks has been to so great an extent abandoned.” Morehouse, in his “History of Inebriating Liquors,” declares that the Mahometans began to use opium when wine was forbidden them. In Turkey, increased demand for wine, of late years, has been accompanied by diminished demand for opium. In hot countries, opium and similar substances are very generally used in place of alcoholic stimulants. These instances establish a probability that opium and alcohol conflict with each other. The use of one is apt to involve the disuse of the other. A number of Massachusetts apothecaries take this view. One Boston druggist says, “Have but one customer, and that a noted temperance lecturer.”

The prevalence of the habit among women is probably explained by the unhappiness of most of them, the mental stagnation, the liability to nervous depression, and in the country, the seclusion and the grinding physical work. Moreover, women are excluded by public opinion from the beer hall and the dram-shop, and they are very subservient to that opinion. Their stimulants must be secret. Opium, in its various forms of laudanum, paregoric, and sulphate of morphia, can be taken readily in private and without interruption of duty.—Chicago Tribune.