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Updated: June 30, 2025


It may, however, be of service to other opium-eaters for me to State briefly, that while endowed in most respects with uncommon vigor of any tendency to despondency or hypochondria, an unusual nervous sensibilitv, together with a constitutional tendency to a disordered condition of the digestive organs, strongly predisposed me to accept the fascination of the opium habit.

It was like a dream that had not been quite a dream; opium-eaters know what the sensation is better than other men.

Opium, the type of the latter class, is in its primary action excitant, but secondarily narcotic. The opium-eaters are familiar with this, and learn by experience to regulate the dose so as to prolong the first and shorten the second effects, as much as possible. Tobacco, on the other hand, is primarily sedative and relaxing. A high authority says of its physiological action:

Thereupon began the dancing of the Egyptian opium-eaters, which was indeed most marvellous, and after them there was a show of bears and apes, which sported right merrily together.

Great armies of beggars and workless, and drunkards and opium-eaters and harlots and criminals are going to be dragged out of these morasses, to bless the land which gave them birth with the wealth of their labor and to build new Indian Empires across the sea.

"Since that time you have been taking your daily dose only to preserve the status in quo. The condition both of your nervous system and your stomach indicate that you must always take some anodyne to avoid torture, and your only anodyne is opium. "The rest of your life must be spent in keeping comfortable, not in being happy." Opium-eaters enjoy a strange immunity from other disease.

In giving the subjoined narratives of the experience of opium-eaters, the compiler has been sorely tempted to weave them into a more coherent and connected story; but he has been restrained by the conviction that the thousands of opium-eaters, whose relief has been his main object in preparing the volume, will be more benefited by allowing each sufferer to tell his own story than by any attempt on his part to generalize the multifarious and often discordant phenomena attendant upon the disuse of opium.

My entire experience has gone to prove that the use of alcohol in any form with opium-eaters undergoing cure is worse than useless, almost invariably redoubling their suffering from loss of opium, and frequently rendering the craving for a return to their curse an incontrollable agony. I therefore leave it entirely out, alike of my pharmacopoia and my bill of fare.

This tendency the reforming opium-eater can not afford to overlook, for no one effect of the experiment is more distressing than the marvellous and unhealthy activity given to this organ by the process through which he is passing. The testimony of all opium-eaters on this point is uniform. For months and even years this organ in those who have relinquished the drug remains disordered.

In cases where great oppression is felt at the epigastrium that corded sensation so much complained of by opium-eaters during their earlier period of abandonment, and that peculiar self-consciousness of the stomach which follows in the track of awakening organic vitality the greatest relief may be expected from "hot fomentations," This is the well-known "hot and wet external application" of the regular practice, and consists of a many-folded square of flannel wrung out of water as hot as the skin can bear, and laid over the pit of the stomach, with renewals as often as the temperature perceptibly falls.

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