The truth about opium

by William H. Brereton

I should like to know what does Mr. Storrs Turner think of that. Here is a highly-educated Spanish gentleman, speaking Chinese well, living amongst the natives, studying their habits, especially as regards their use of the opium pipe, declaring that the practice is innocuous. Now, supposing that instead of smoking opium these Chinese in Malacca, Java, Borneo, and the Philippines were addicted to the habitual use of spirits, wine, or even beer, instead of opium, can any intelligent being suppose for a moment that they would be the patient, strong, healthy, hard-working people that Don Sinibaldo De Mas found them, and which they still are?

Let us refer to Mr. W. Donald Spence’s testimony as to the effects of opium. I quote again from his Report of the trade of Ichang for 1881:—

As to the effect of this habit on the people, amongst whom it is so widespread, there is but one opinion. Baron Richthofen, the most experienced traveller who ever visited Szechuan, after noticing the extraordinary prevalence of the habit, says:—“In no other province except Hunan did I find the effects of the use of opium so little perceptible as in Szechuan.” Mr. Colborne Baber, who knows more of the province and its people than any living Englishman, says: Nowhere in China are the people so well off, or so hardy, and nowhere do they smoke so much opium. To these names of weight I add my own short experience. I found the people of Szechuan stout, able-bodied men, better housed, clad, and fed, and healthier looking than the Chinese of the Lower Yang-tsze. I did not see amongst them more emaciated faces and wasted forms than disease causes in all lands. People with slow wasting diseases such as consumption are, if they smoke opium, apt to be classed amongst the “ruined victims” of hasty observers, and amongst the cases of combined debility and opium smoking I saw, some were, by their own account, pseudo-victims of this type. There were some, too, whose health was completely sapped by smoking combined with other forms of sensual excess. And no doubt there were others weakened by excessive smoking simply, for excess in all things has its penalty. But the general health and well-being of the Szechuan community is remarkable; to their capacity for work and endurance of hardship, as well as to the material comforts of life they surround themselves with, all travellers bear enthusiastic testimony.

Now, allow me to ask the reader, can he suppose for a moment that if the people of Szechuan were prone to spirits, or even to beer drinking, in the same way as they are given to opium smoking, should we have the same results? Would those people be “so well off and so hardy,” so stout, able-bodied, and so much “better housed, clad, and fed, and healthier looking than the Chinese of the Lower Yang-tsze?” I think not. What, then, is the fair conclusion to draw from such a state of things? Why, only that opium smoking is a harmless if not a beneficial practice, unless when indulged in to an inordinate extent, which, it is now plain, is entirely exceptional. I think I am not far from the truth in saying that for one excessive opium smoker to be met with in China you will find in this country a hundred cases, at the least, of excessive indulgence in alcohol—the effects of this being incurable, whilst it is quite otherwise as regards excessive indulgence in opium. The inference, then, I think, is that so far as regards any evil effects from opium smoking, they are out of the range of practical politics and should be relegated to the region of sentiment alone.

I will now give you a passage from a valuable work by the learned Dr. J. L. W. Thudichum, Lecturer to St. George’s Hospital,[10] which will throw a good deal of light upon this part of my subject. At pp. 88 and 89 of the second volume he says:—

The medical uses of opium have been so well known through all historical times that it is a matter for surprise to find that they are not better appreciated in the present day. In this, as in many other matters, we are in fact only gradually emerging from the condition of those dark times during which, amongst many good things, the knowledge of opium, for example, was lost.... These and other considerations led me to look about for a more convenient mode of producing the effects of morphia without its inconveniences or even dangers. I know from the experiments of Descharmes and Benard (Compt. Rend., 40, 34) that in opium-smoking a portion of the morphia is volatilized and undecomposed, and I therefore experimentalized with the pyrolytic vapours of opium, first upon myself, then upon others; and when I had made myself fully acquainted with the Chinese method of using the drug, I came to the conviction that here one of the most interesting therapeutical problems had been solved in the most ingenious and at the same time in the most safe manner. I held in my hand a power well-known and used largely by Eastern races, yet its use neglected, ignored, denounced, and despised by the entire Western world.

In other and non-professional words, Dr. Thudichum has found opium smoking not only harmless but a valuable curative practice.

As to Chinese evidence on this question I could, had I thought proper, have adduced the testimony of some really trustworthy Chinese merchants and traders, which would have fully borne out all that I have stated as to the innocuous effects of opium smoking. I have refrained from doing so, because such evidence, however strong and reliable, would, I feel assured, be impugned as untrustworthy by the agents of the Anti-Opium Society and missionaries, who on their part would, no doubt, in the best faith and with good intentions, I admit, bring out counter testimony of so-called Christian converts and other natives of a wholly unreliable character. One of these persons, called Kwong Ki Chiu, styling himself “late a member of the Chinese Educational Commission in the United States,” has written, or purported to have written, from Hartford, in Connecticut, a letter on this question to the London and China Telegraph. The statements in this document are exaggerated, misleading, and, in many respects, actually untrue. I doubt very much if the letter was ever, in fact, written by a Chinaman at all, and suspect it was produced either here in London by some agent or advocate of the Anti-Opium Society and forwarded to Mr. Kwong Ki Chiu for signature, or that it was written by some American missionary. At any rate, it is plain that the writer has no real knowledge of the subject of his letter. To prove this is so it is only necessary to refer to one passage, in which the writer proceeds to show that opium is to a beginner more alluring than tobacco or spirits. He says:—

There is this also to be said as to the difference between the two stimulants: opium is much the more stimulating, and therefore more dangerous. It is also much more agreeable and fascinating. Not every person likes the taste of liquor; the flavour of tobacco is agreeable to very few persons at first: but everyone, of whatever nationality, finds the fragrance of the smoking opium agreeable and tempting, so that I have no doubt that if opium shops were opened in London as in China, the habit would soon become prevalent even among Englishmen.

Now this is not true. Every foreigner who has lived in China knows it to be quite the opposite. During my long residence in Hong Kong I have never known a single instance of an Englishman, or any other foreigner, being an opium smoker, although I have met with many who had smoked a few pipes by way of experiment. All have assured me that the vapour was nauseous, and produced no pleasurable sensations whatever. The fact that Europeans dislike the fumes of opium, and never indulge in the opium pipe, shows that Mr. Kwong Ki Chiu, who has doubtless been since his childhood under missionary tutelage, and therefore interdicted from the use of the drug, knows nothing reliable upon the subject he writes about so glibly. At a proper time and place, I should be prepared to treat Mr. Storrs Turner to such native testimony upon this subject as would make him open his eyes very wide and put him and his disciples to confusion and flight.