Medical Jurisprudence is crowded with instances in which hemp has been employed in the commission of crimes. A single instance, which came within the writer’s personal experience, will however suffice. The Civil Surgeon of ... had gone out on tour leaving behind his wife and family of three small boys. The bedroom occupied by Mrs. Blank adjoined that usually occupied by the doctor, which contained a large, heavy iron safe in which was Mrs. Blank’s jewellery and a large sum of money. That night, Mrs. Blank and the children retired to bed at the usual hour; but upon waking in the morning, she felt unrefreshed and languid. The children complained of a like feeling. Going into her husband’s room, Mrs. Blank was shocked to find that the safe had disappeared, one of its heavy massive handles lay wrenched off upon the floor, and a twisted gun barrel near by had too apparently been used ineffectually as a lever. An alarm was raised, and the police called in. Mrs. Blank averred that the safe was too large and heavy for fewer than six powerful men to carry down stairs. That she had been drugged there could be no doubt; she had slept and the children had slept through the night undisturbed, and it was impossible to conceive how they could otherwise have done so, with evidences of such noisy activities abundant in the next room. The safe was never found, and the culprits were never brought to book; but the discovery of a small patch of cultivated hemp, on some land belonging to a man servant who was in the Civil Surgeon’s employ at the time of the burglary, made the case clear, and the servant’s complicity morally, if not judicially, certain.
L’ENVOI.
A Persian Allegory.
Three men, one under the effects of alcohol, one under the effects of opium, and the last under the effects of hemp, arrived one night at the closed gates of a city. “Let us break down the gates,” said the alcohol drinker in a fury of rage, “I can do it with my sword!” “Nay,” said the opium eater, “We can rest here outside in comfort till the morning, when the gates will be opened, and we may enter.” “Why all this foolish talk?” whined the one under the effects of hemp. “Let us creep in through the key-hole. We can make ourselves small enough!”
APPENDIX.
An Historical Note on Opium in India and Burma.
It is doubtful whether there is a more valuable drug in the Materia Medica than opium. Fundamentally, it is the dried juice of the Papaver Somniferum or white poppy, and although all varieties of poppy are capable of producing opium, the best comes from the white, and it is this variety that is systematically cultivated for the world’s supply of opium.
Opium has been the cause of at least one war, namely, the war between England and China, and a perusal of the accounts of piracy in the eastern seas during the sixteenth century affords numerous instances of pitched battles between traders and pirates whose one object seems to have been to get possession of valuable cargoes of opium.