WHERE THE OPIUM FIEND HOLDS SWAY

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 4, 26 March 1927, Page 18 (Supplement)

WHERE THE OPIUM FIEND HOLDS SWAY

A DRAMA OF HORROR Opium is the father and tne mother of nearly the whole tribe of narcotics, says A. Laurie in the San Francisco “Examiner.” Opium comes, as everybody knows, from the opium poppy. It is grown and cultivated in India, in Persia, in China, and in the Straits Settlements. In the British Oriental Colony, it is a Cover*.ment affair to raise opium. The British Government gives the opium farmer his seed, helps him to cultivate his ground, and when his strange fruit is ready to market —the British Government sells it for him. For sale in the open market, misery, degradation, crime, shame, disgrace, untold suffering—who’ll buy, who’ll buy? All the world, apparently. The opium sold at the public auction in Calcutta and in Rangoon and in all the British centres of the Far East and the Near East, too, for that matter, is bought by the French and the Italian and the Swiss and , the Belgian and the English and the American. Can Be Blessing. And some of it is made into crude opium for smoking and some of it into morphine and some of it into heroin. The druggists of the world buy it — and rightly, too. For without opium and the by-pro-ducts of opium, the surgery of the earth would come almost to a standstill and the groan of the sick and dying would drown out the mere business of living. Opium is a great blessing to the world—rightly used. But how much of this great crop is rightly used for the relief of unbearable suffering? Just about one-twentieth part of all the opium—so the experts say. The rest goes, not to relieve pain, but to make it; not to help the suffering. but to bind the shackles of incredible slavery on the free and the young and the hopeful. How does it work? Like this: Opium smoking is from the first a delusion and a snare. It does not in most cases bring gorgeous dreams of voluptuous delight. I’ve talked to opium smokers in every large city of America and in some cities not in America, and they nearly all tell the same, strange story. Dreams, yes—but not delightful ones. Dreams of black gulfs, dreams of huge birds with bloody beaks, dreams of writhing serpents, dreams of dancing skeletons,' dreams of weird, w r ild winds, with a sort of 'Supernatural horror behind them, mad dreams, crazy dreams, terrifying dreams. Time is nothing, space does not exist. The opium smoker travels around the world in a flash. He sinks to the bottom of the sea and rises to the top of terrifying mountain peaks. One smoker told me of travelling from a deep forest in Asia to some little village in the Middle West in the twinkling of an eye and when he awoke he felt still the wild winds in his hair and in his ears rang for days

the clamour of strange and mysterious seas. One smoke, two smokes, three smokes, it’s all over. The smoker has the “habit.” He goes on, not to get peace, not to get forgetfulness, but to satisfy a horrible craving that will not let him alone by day or by night, -waking or sleeping. Smokers Dry Up Opium drugs, it does not in the majority of cases kill. Opium smokers dry up, they wither into skeletons; they steal, they lie to get more opium. They are flitting shadows of men. Honour, courage, manhood—gone as snow is gone beneath a summer sun—but they live on and on, to the misery of everyone who ever loved them, and to the biting, stinging, lashing agony of their own poor whipped and beaten bodies and their own poor tortured souls. The Chinese and the East Indians can use opium and live, use if for years; the opium smoker is the tool of anyone who will get him his daily whiff, he is too weakened to work for it, too cowed to fight, too dazed to care—for anything or anybody. But he will live on for years, dried into a kind of mummified existence, like a sun-dried corpse of the Aztecs. White men cannot do this. Easy to Detect Opium tortures them and laughs at them and finally it kills them. Opium smoking is on the wane in the United States. It is too easy to detect, it takes too clumsy an apparatus. You can’t carry an opium lay-out around in your vest pocket, and the fumes of the smoke, once smelled, will be recognised anywhere on earth. Opium smoking, as a vice, in the slums of America, or in the “ gay life ” of America, either, is going out. But how about morphine, the daughter of opium? Morphine, the smiling, comforting, beguiling, sycophantic jade, who comes in the guise of a gentle nurse. What about the use of morphine in America? Is it lessening or growing? How shall we recognise the use of it when we see the victims and what can we do to help them?