TWO FASHIONABLE POISONS.
BY M. P. REGNARD.
Some one said one day before Fontenelle, that coffee was a slow poison. “I can bear witness to that,” replied the witty academician, “for it will soon be fifty years since I began taking it every day.”
This, which was on the part of the cultivated scholar, a brilliant sally of wit, is, alas! the common reasoning of many people who, simply because danger does not immediately confront them, allow themselves to be slowly but surely drawn to the tomb, because, forsooth, the way, for the time being, is pleasant, or fashionable!
In the midst of us there are persons poisoning themselves to death. I refer to those addicted to the use of morphine. In England they have another class of these unfortunates, for whom the most adulterated liquors no longer suffice, and who drink ether; they are a sort of perfected inebriates, who by the scientific laws of progress succeed simple drunkards just as habitual morphine users follow the opium smokers of China. Our fathers in Asia who have already bequeathed to us many misfortunes, held in check until within recent years, among themselves, the singular taste which they have for opium. Let me tell you in a few words of the ancestors of morphine users of to-day, and you will better understand the history of the latter.
The mania for opium eating diminishes rather than increases among the Mussulmans. Zambaco, who for a long time lived in the Orient, gives the reason. The Turk seeks in opium only intoxication—a delicious sort of annihilation—which he finds to-day more readily in champagne or Bordeaux wine. These give him, in addition, the pleasures of taste. Then, too, he can indulge himself freely in them, and still hold to the letter of the Koran. In the time of Mahomet neither rum nor cognac were invented; it does not then forbid them. But that which is not forbidden is permitted, and so the Mussulman, who considers wine so impure that he will not touch it, even with his hands, will become beastly intoxicated upon brandy, and think that by this process he is not compromising his part in Paradise. But their religionists—and above all their medical men—do not reason thus. They still cling to the opium.
Its first effect upon the system is far from causing sleep. It is rather a sort of intellectual and physical excitant, which renders the Oriental (in his natural state sad and silent), turbulent, loquacious, excitable, and quarrelsome.
These Turks are not contented to take opium themselves, they give it also to their horses. “I have just,” says Burns, “traveled all night with a cavalier of this country. After a fatiguing ride of about thirty miles I was obliged to accept the proposition he made to rest for a few minutes. He employed this time in dividing with his exhausted horse a dose of opium of about two grammes. The effects were very soon evident upon both; the horse finished with ease a journey of forty miles, and the cavalier became more animated.”