They will lie and steal, do almost anything to obtain the drug with which and without which they are finally in a veritable hell. The face becomes sallow and soggy, the eyes bleared and expressionless, and the final result is either death or insanity. Some persons go on using these drugs for years before the symptoms here described supervene; some are thus affected in a few months.
Having reached this stage they cannot arouse themselves from their terrible infatuation. Gloomy and hopeless, the world and the people in it no longer interest them. A patient whom I saw some years ago, a young Spaniard, was suffering from insanity from the use of morphine. Hour by hour he would sit folding, refolding and cutting paper into small bits with an old lancet. He would speak to no one, notice no one. This went on for months. He was sent to an insane asylum finally, and on searching his trunk some two score morphine bottles, as well as the greater part of the trunk, was filled with these minute scraps of paper. I have never been able to learn what became of him.
A lady patient of mine, well advanced in years, would save scraps of tin, old bits of rags, glass stoppers of bottles, and the like, setting great store by them. She laughed heartily at her collection, and threw them away one week after her emancipation.
Sometimes there is a mawkish sentimentality exhibited toward the opposite sex; sometimes there is mock modesty or direct abhorrence.
In the majority of instances these people are great liars, especially about matters concerning their habituation; often also about trivial things, where falsification is absurd and absolutely without excuse.
Occasionally there is a loss of connection between ideas in talking, incoherence and silliness. The speech is, as a rule, slow and somewhat drawling, and often interrupted to wet the lips, which become dry and parched. Severe pain in the head and about the region of the heart is sometimes complained of, also in the “small of the back.”
In some cases, more especially those of an intensely nervous organization, the prolonged abuse of opium or morphine produces a condition characterized by cerebral excitement, analogous to that of delirium potatorum. These people are, however, less violent, and the affection usually passes away in a short time, without treatment.
THE NERVOUS SYSTEM.
On the nervous system the effects of opium and morphine are most manifest. Taken at first to relieve pain and disorders of this system, having their chief action upon it at all times, their continued use reacts with deadly intensity. Twitching of isolated muscles, trembling of the hands and of the tongue, when protruded, and occasionally paralysis of one eyelid, are seen. The pains that supervene have no distinctive character, as do those that come from the abuse of chloral.