All about opium / edited by Hartmann Henry Sultzberger.

Date:
1884
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: All about opium / edited by Hartmann Henry Sultzberger. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    deprived of their opium, as the opium smokers hare been, the conse- quences would have been serious. I can also speak from personal experience. I have eaten opium till I could consume half an ounce daily, and I can understand the fasci- nation of that habit, and fully appreciate the difficulty of leaving it off. I hav® myself smoked three mace of the opium farmer’s prepared opium within an hour without the slightest effect. I have watched other Europeans do the same, as they admitted, to their astonishment, with no effect either. I counted their pulses and took their temperature, neither of which were altered by smoking in the slightest degree. Three mace is equivalent to twelve pipes, and a pipe every five minutes is certainly more than a smoker could get through had he to load for himself. The actual smoking is but three long inhalations to each pipe, but the loading takes time. An old opium smoker always prepared our pipes for us, and watched that they were fairly and properly smoked. No opium smoker among the Chinese smokes with the idea of pro- curing sleep ; being naturally tired, he may take a pipe or two before going to sleep, but with no intention of helping him to sleep. An opium smoker visits a friend who offers him a pipe, and they lie smoking and chatting between the pipes for hours, just as a European offers wine to a friend. The Chinaman does not expect his visitor to go off to sleep and snore like a hog any more than the European expects his friend to get drunk and make a beast of himself. That it is costly and expensive as a habit there is no denial, and in , order to procure this luxury, unless a well-to-do man, the Chinaman must deprive himself and his family of many comforts and necessaries. A consumption of fifteen mace a day means an expenditure of $1.20 daily, or $438.00 a year, say £80. One mace of eight cents’ worth of opium daily is equal (allowing thirty days to the month) to $2.40, a pretty hole in the income of a man who earns, say six dollars a month, and many smoke that amount who earn a good deal less than six dollars a month. So far, what I have said concerning opium smoking in my reports has dealt with facts and figures known to myself to be correct : I have given nothing on hearsay. A man of the Western races who would take to such a habit as opium smoking must be a miserable object, a habit that requires you to muddle away more than an hour loading a pipe in order to get five minutes’ smoke, for each pipe takes about five minutes to load and less than thirty seconds to smoke. One can under- stand a tobacco pipe that will last half an hour, takes only a few seconds to load, and will allow you to read, write, and do a hundred other things at the same time—at least I can, being a smoker myself ; but the opium smoker is a complete puzzle to me, to find out what pleasure he derives from the habit ; all I can see in it is a waste of time and money.