“The smoker does not trouble himself to plant seeds, nor to go out.
“The houses in Shansi are very good; in fact, they are better than in other provinces, but they are rapidly going to ruin owing to the excessive smoking of opium, and wherever one goes the ruins are seen on every side. On the roads the people can get a little money by selling things, but off the main roads the distress is worse than anywhere else.
“Up in the hills I stopped at a village and inquired if they had any food for sale, and they told me that they had nothing but frozen potatoes. So I asked to be shown those, and I went into one of the hovels and found little potatoes, perhaps one-half an inch across, frozen, and all strewn over the kang (the brick bed), where they were drying. As soon as they were dry, they were to be ground down into a meal of which dumplings were made, and these were steamed. That was their only diet, and had been for the past month. They had no money at all. What money they had possessed had been spent on opium, and they could not expect anything to make up the crop of potatoes the following autumn. I noticed in a basin a few dried sticks, and I asked what they were for, and the man told me they were the sticks taken from the sieve through which the opium was filtered for purification. These sticks are soaked in hot water, and the water, which contains a little opium, is drunk. They were using this in place of opium. I gave this man twenty cents, and the next day when I returned he was enjoying a pipe of opium.
“While passing through an iron-smelting village I noticed that the blacksmiths who beat up the pig iron were regular living skeletons. They work from about five in the morning until about five in the evening, stopping twice during that time for meals. When they leave off in the evening, after a hasty meal they start with their pipes and go on until they are asleep. I do not know how these men can work. I presume that it was the hard work that made them take to opium-smoking.
“On asking people why they had taken to the drug, they invariably replied that it was for the cure of a pain of some sort—for relieving the suffering. The women often take to it after childbirth, and this is generally what starts them to smoking.
“The wealthier men who smoke opium nearly all day cannot enter another room until this room has first been filled with the fumes of opium. Some one has to go into the room first and smoke a few pipes, so that the air of the room may be in proper condition.
“There was an official in Shau-ying who used to keep six slave girls going all day filling his pipes. The slave girls and brides very often try to commit suicide by eating opium, owing to the harsh treatment they receive.”
Everywhere along the highroad and in the cities and villages of Shansi you see the opium face. The opium-smoker, like the opium-eater, rapidly loses flesh when the habit has fixed itself on him. The colour leaves his skin, and it becomes dry, like parchment. His eye loses whatever light and sparkle it may have had, and becomes dull and listless. The opium face has been best described as a “peculiarly withered and blasted countenance.” With this face is usually associated a thin body and a languid gait. Opium gets such a powerful grip on a confirmed smoker that it is usually unsafe for him to give up the habit without medical aid. His appetite is taken away, his digestion is impaired, there is congestion of the various internal organs, and congestion of the lungs. Constipation and diarrhœa result, with pain all over the body. By the time he has reached this stage, the smoker has become both physically and mentally weak and inactive. With his intellect deadened, his physical and moral sense impaired, he sinks into laziness, immorality, and debauchery. He has lost his power of resistance to disease, and becomes predisposed to colds, bronchitis, diarrhœa, dysentery, and dyspepsia. Brigade Surgeon J. H. Condon, M. D., M. R. C. S., speaking of opium-eaters before the Royal Commission on Opium, said: “They become emaciated and debilitated, miserable-looking wretches, and finally die, most commonly of diarrhœa induced by the use of opium.”
When a man has got himself into this condition, he must have opium, and must have it all the time. I have already pointed out that opium-smoking not only is perhaps the most expensive of the vices, but that, unlike opium-eating, it consumes an immense amount of time. Few smokers can keep slaves to fill their pipes for them, like that wealthy official at Shau-ying. It takes a seasoned smoker from fifteen minutes to half an hour to prepare a pipe to his satisfaction, smoke it, and rouse himself to begin the operation again. If he smokes ten or twenty pipes a day, which is common, and then sleeps off the effects, it is not hard to figure out the number of hours left for business each day. When he has slept, and the day is well started, his body at once begins to clamour for more opium. He must begin smoking again, or he will suffer an agony of physical and mental torture. His ten to twenty pipes a day will cost him from fifty cents or a dollar (if he is a poor man and smokes the scrapings from the rich man’s pipe), to ten or twenty dollars (or more, if he smokes a high grade of opium). I learned of many wealthy merchants and officials who smoke from forty to sixty pipes a day.
It is just at this period, when the smoker is so enslaved by the drug that he has lost his earning power, that his opium expenditure increases most rapidly. He is buying opium now, not so much to gratify his selfish vice, as to keep himself alive. He becomes frantic for opium. He will sell anything he has to buy the stuff. His moral sense is destroyed. A diseased, decrepit, insane being, he forgets even his family. He sells his bric-a-brac, his pictures, his furniture. He sells his daughters, even his wife, if she has attractions, as slaves to rich men. He tears his house to pieces, sells the tiles of his roof, the bricks of his walls, the woodwork about his doors and windows. He cuts down the trees in his yard and sells the wood. And at last he crawls out on the highway, digs himself a cave in the loess (if he has strength enough), and prostrates himself before the camel and donkey drivers, whining, chattering, praying that a few copper cash be thrown to him.