FRENCH OPIUM-SMOKERS.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1628, 1 September 1887, Page 3

FRENCH OPIUM-SMOKERS.

There is at present in the Hospital of the Charity a young non-commis-sioned officer, as he would be called in England, who is undergoing treatment as a victim to opium-smoking. The soldier, who is a man of education, has given a remarkable account of his experiences as an opium-smoker. He gays that while in Tonkin or Cochin China, one of the French generals caused an order to be issued against: the use of the drug, and this very prohibition was the means of making several men try opium-smoking through curiosity. The non-commis-sioned officer went with some comrades to the smoking saloon of a village. There a woman came to him and filled a long pipe with a small ball of what appeared to be ath'ck brown syrup, made as consistent as wax. This tbe soldier Was pressed to take, and, placing its bowl over a lamp which was alight, he inhaled what Beemed to be the fumes of sugar and burnt apples. He was at first rendered iil, but after a second pipe was plunged into the ecstatic dreams described by De Quincey, Baudelaire, and M. rW Bonnetain. He seemed to float into a ! of lukewarm milk, and

memories that had long laid buried passed clearly through his imagination. He recollected forgotten melodies, snatches of songs, and extracts from various authors; but when he awoke from the reverie he was perspiring with pain and fear. After this he kept up the habit for six months, smoking thirty grammes of opium on the day he left for France. The man at present looks rather livid, and his general appearance is that of a person who had been paralysed. It is expected, however, that he will be brought round by the treatment of the hospital physicians. M. Anatola France, who has asked the man for a statement of his experiences, says that at the present moment there is an opium saloon at Montmartre. It is chiefly frequented by young artists and sculptors, and he himself was allowed by special permission to enter a private room, where he saw, stretched on a divan, lank and livid, one of the best known sculptors in Paris, who was slowly poisoning himself with opium owing to the death of his wife, whose vision he was able to conjure up amid the fumes of the deleterious drug.—Daily Telegraph.