OPIUM AND EAST INDIAN HEMP.
Children of Night! from Lethe’s bourn,
Ye come to weave the oblivious veil,
And on the wretched and forlorn
To bid your sweet illusions steal.—Fracastoro.
There is nothing in nature more curious and inexplicable than the influence on the circulating fluids, and through these on the brain and its functions, of various narcotic drugs. Among these, opium, and Cannabis Indica, or East Indian hemp, occupy the most prominent place. No reflective person can look into the writings of Coleridge, De Quincey, or Bayard Taylor, each of whom has experienced the effects of these drugs in his own person, and graphically described his sensations, thoughts, feelings, and dreams while under their influence, without being struck with awe and astonishment at the modifying and disturbing influences which these substances exert upon that mysterious connection which exists between the mind and the material medium through which it manifests itself. Take the following, for example, from the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, which, not only for grandeur of description, but for psychological interest, is unsurpassed by any thing in the English language.
“The dream commenced with a music which now I often heard in dreams,—a music of preparation and of awakening suspense; a music like the opening of the Coronation Anthem, and which, like that, gave the feeling of a vast march—of infinite cavalcades filing off, and the tread of innumerable armies. The morning was come of a mighty day—a day of crisis and of final hope for human nature, then suffering some mysterious eclipse and laboring in some dread extremity. Somewhere, I knew not where—somehow, I knew not how—by some beings, I knew not whom—a battle, a strife, an agony, was conducting,—was evolving like a great drama, or piece of music; with which my sympathy was the more insupportable from my confusion as to its place, its cause, its nature, and its possible issue. I, as is usual in dreams, (where, of necessity, we make ourselves central to every movement,) had the power, and yet had not the power, to decide it. I had the power, if I could raise myself, to will it; and yet again had not the power, for the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt.
“‘Deeper than ever plummet sounded,’ I lay inactive. Then, like a chorus, the passion deepened. Some greater interest was at stake,—some mightier cause than ever yet the sword had pleaded or trumpet had proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms; hurryings to and fro; trepidations of innumerable fugitives—I knew not whether from the good cause or the bad; darkness and lights; tempest and human faces; and, at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the features that were worth all the world to me, and but a moment allowed—and clasped hands, and heart-breaking partings, and then everlasting farewells! and, with a sigh such as the caves of hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of death, the sound was reverberated,—everlasting farewells! and again, and yet again, reverberated,—everlasting farewells! And I awoke in struggles, and cried aloud, ‘I will sleep no more!’”
De Quincey took laudanum for the first time to dispel pain, and he thus describes the effect it had upon him:—“But I took it, and in an hour, oh, heavens! what a revulsion! what an upheaving, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit! what an apocalypse of the world within me! That my pains had vanished was now a trifle in my eyes. This negative effect was swallowed up in the immensity of those positive effects which had opened before me,—in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed. Here was a panacea,—a φαρμακον νεπενθες for all human woes. Here was the secret of happiness, about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered! Happiness might now be bought for a penny and carried in the waistcoat-pocket; portable ecstasies might be had corked up in a pint bottle; and peace of mind could be sent down in gallons by the mail-coach.”
Dr. Madden describes more soberly his sensations when under the influence of the drug in one of the coffee-houses at Constantinople. “I commenced with one grain. In the course of an hour and a half it produced no perceptible effect. The coffee-house keeper was very anxious to give me an additional pill of two grains, but I was contented with half a one; and in another half-hour, feeling nothing of the expected revery, I took half a grain more, making in all two grains in the course of two hours. After two hours and a half from the first dose, my spirits became sensibly excited: the pleasure of the sensation seemed to depend on a universal expansion of mind and matter. My faculties appeared enlarged; every thing I looked at seemed increased in volume; I had no longer the same pleasure when I closed my eyes which I had when they were open; it appeared to me as if it was only external objects which were acted on by the imagination and magnified into images of pleasure: in short, it was the ‘faint, exquisite music of a dream’ in a waking moment. I made my way home as fast as possible, dreading at every step that I should commit some extravagance. In walking, I was hardly sensible of my feet touching the ground: it seemed as if I slid along the street impelled by some invisible agent, and that my blood was composed of some ethereal fluid, which rendered my body lighter than air. I got to bed the moment I reached home. The most extraordinary visions of delight filled my brain all night. In the morning I rose pale and dispirited; my head ached; my body was so debilitated that I was obliged to remain on the sofa all day, dearly paying for my first essay at opium-eating.”
These after-effects are the source of the misery of the opium-eater. The exciting influence of the drug is almost invariably followed by a corresponding depression. The susceptibility to external impressions and the muscular energy are both lessened. A desire for repose ensues, and a tendency to sleep. The mouth and throat also become dry; the thirst is increased; hunger diminishes; and the bowels usually become torpid.
When large doses are taken, all the above effects are hastened and heightened in proportion. The period of depression comes on sooner; the prostration of energy increases to actual stupor, with or without dreams; the pulse becomes feeble, the muscles exceedingly relaxed; and, if enough has been taken, death ensues.
Of course, all these effects are modified by the constitution of the individual, by the length of time he has accustomed himself to take it, and by the circumstances in which he is placed. But upon all persons, and in all circumstances, its final effects, like those of ardent spirits taken in large and repeated doses, are equally melancholy and degrading. “A total attenuation of body,” says Dr. Oppenheim, “a withered, yellow countenance, a lame gait, a bending of the spine, frequently to such a degree as to assume a circular form, and glassy, deep-sunken eyes, betray the opium-eater at the first glance. The digestive organs are in the highest degree disturbed: the sufferer eats scarcely any thing, and has hardly one evacuation in a week. His mental and bodily powers are destroyed: he is impotent.”
The influence upon the mental faculties of Haschisch, or East Indian hemp, when taken in large doses, is no less extraordinary than that of opium.
That accomplished traveller, Bayard Taylor, when in Damascus, “prompted,” as he says, “by that insatiable curiosity which led him to prefer the acquisition of all lawful knowledge through the channel of his own experience,” was induced to make a trial of this drug. Not knowing the strength of the preparation he employed, he found himself, shortly after taking the second dose, more thoroughly and completely under the influence of the drug than was either pleasant or safe.
Speaking of the effects of the stronger dose, he says, “The same fine nervous thrill of which I have spoken suddenly shot through me. But this time it was accompanied with a burning sensation at the pit of the stomach; and, instead of growing upon me with the gradual pace of healthy slumber, and resolving me, as before, into air, it came with the intensity of a pang, and shot throbbing along the nerves to the extremities of my body. The sense of limitation—the confinement of our senses within the bounds of our own flesh and blood—instantly fell away. The walls of my frame were burst outward, and tumbled into ruin; and, without thinking what form I wore,—losing sight even of all idea of form,—I felt that I existed throughout a vast extent of space. The blood pulsed from my heart, sped through uncounted leagues before it reached my extremities; the air drawn into my lungs expanded into seas of limpid ether; and the arch of my skull was broader than the vault of heaven. Within the concave that held my brain were the fathomless deeps of blue; clouds floated there, and the winds of heaven rolled them together; and there shone the orb of the sun. It was—though I thought not of that at the time—like a revelation of the mystery of Omnipresence.”