Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 August 1875 — Opium-Eaters. [ARTICLE]

Opium-Eaters.

Measures of a severe nature have been tried in China to check the use of opium, but have been quite unsuccessful. However apathetic the Chinese may be in re* spect to most things, they will not submit to the withdrawal of their favorite narcotic. But in case of so dangerous a poison some restrictions are as much needed as they are on the sale of spirituous liquorsamong ourselves; for the effects of habitual excess are not less deplorable than those of habitual drunkenness. Of forty prisoners confined in the House of Correction at Singapore, thirty-five were foUnd to use opium; and of these, seventeen, who had been in receipt of eighteen shillings a month as wages, spent twentyfour shillings on opium, the difference being obtained by theft. From a sanitary point of view the results are equally sad. The confirmed opium-eater in the East seldom lives beyond the age of forty, and may be recognized at a glance by his trembling steps and curved spine, his sunken, glassy eye and sallow, withered features. The muscles, too, of his neck and fingers often become contracted. Yet incurring evfeh this penalty will enable him to indulge his vice only for a certain length of time. Unlike the healthy enjoyment which we derive from our appetite of hunger, and which nature herself renews periodically, the enjoyment of the opium-eater gradually diminishes as his system becomes habituated to the drug. > From time to time he must increase the quantity which he takes, but at length no increase wiu produce any effect. Under these circumstances he has recourse to a dangerous expedient; he mixes a small quantity of corrosive sublimate with the opium, the influence of which is thus for a time renewed. Then these means also fail, when the victim must bear his miserable condition until he sinks into the grave. On the excitable temperament of the Malays and Javanese a strong dose of opium Causes a state of frantic fury amounting almost to madness, and this often ends in that homicidal mania which has been called “ running amuck,” in other words, in the individual attacking with his crease or dagger every one Whom he meets, so that it becomes necessary to shoot him down with as little compunction as we do a mad dog.