Health and Temperance by Mrs. James Havens

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Dec 2, 1886

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 12, No. 46.

Health and Temperance.

By Mrs. James Havens

Opium and Tobacco.

OFFICIAL reports show that the demand for opium is such that its importation into the United States is increasing with alarming rapidity. And the number of fresh victims upon the shrine of this fascinating Moloch increases with the dawning of every morning and the setting of every sun. And it is erroneous to suppose that only depraved and abandoned characters become victims of the terrible "opium habit." In my careful researches on this subject I have found far more victims of opium whose lives have been passed in the surroundings of wealth, intelligence, and culture, than in the haunts of squalor, wretchedness, and crime (the latter being chiefly addicted to alcohol, tobacco, and chloroform).

Women of refinement and culture, of more or less note, men of grandeur of intellect and apparent moral character, youth with its rose-tinted hopes of a glorious, possible future, all alike are subject to the fascinations and entanglements of this seductive devil!

Ministers, whose trumpet notes of warning to flee the wrath to come, ring in tones of eloquent entreaty from the pulpit, are themselves standing helpless, hopeless, and powerless upon the ghastly brink of a narcotic hell! And there are learned physicians, too, who daily and hourly listen to the song of this siren, knowing full well that every sylvan note but draws them nearer and nearer to their impending doom!

No department of business, no profession however exalted and pure, is exempt from the horror of the opium hell if once induced to enter the maelstrom of its fascination and seductive influence. The various narcotic habits are tightening upon our people like the ever-contracting folds of an iron shroud, from which there is no escape. Tobacco has become the all-powerful, all-potent ruler of men. The grandest minds, the proudest intellects in our commonwealth freely acknowledge their subserviency to this disgusting narcotic.

Meta Lander, in her excellent work on the "Tobacco Problem," has shown the disgusting slavery of tobacco in a truthful manner, and we cordially indorse her book and recommend it to the careful reading of all our State and local superintendents of narcotics.

But while the tobacco habit is enslaving the men of America, we find with alarm the growing tendency of our people, especially the women, toward the formation of drug habits, especially morphine, chloral, chloroform, and cocaine. But for several years I have been fully impressed with the idea that of all the stimulants and narcotics to which mankind has fallen victim the "opium habit" is without a parallel in its devastating influence.

While alcohol has filled our land with woe by the enslaving of our men, opium has reaped its harvest of devastation among our women, and has wrought a weight of woe and home desecration unknown to the demon of alcohol. Opium is more seductive and deceptive than alcohol, or any other narcotic. It carries with it the golden keys to the sunniest bowers of Paradise, erelong to unlock for its victims the lowest depths of the ghastliest hell. But the supernal ecstasies of the opium paradise can in nowise compensate for the unutterable horrors of the opium hell!

Study the evil more carefully in all its fearful forms, arrange wise, energetic, patient committees who will conscientiously prosecute the work of this toilful department. Strenuous legislative enactment against the pernicious sale of opium, chloral, cocaine, and chloroform, is our present aim and hope. I learn with sorrow that many of our State and local Unions are entirely without a department of narcotics.

Dear sisters, the woe is upon us, and its insidious presence is sitting to-day as a ghastly specter by the hearth-stones of thousands of once happy homes in our land! It rests upon us as the deepening shadow of a great sin, and shall we longer live blindly indifferent to its baleful invasion?

And this fearful narcotic desecration is permitted by one of the grandest Governments the sun ever smiled upon! Upon whom rests the blame? Upon us all if we now fail to take advantage of the spirit of the times that evidently points encouragingly toward the possible future when narcotic addiction will be rendered far more difficult by wise and prudent legislative enactment. Dear sisters, shall I appeal in vain for your assistance in this important and toilful department?—Mrs. James Havens, National Superintendent and Lecturer W. C. T. U., Department of Narcotics, Denver, Colorado, in Union Signal.