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Updated: June 30, 2025
The number of confirmed opium-eaters in the United States is large, not less, judging from the testimony of druggists in all parts of the country as well as from other sources, than eighty to a hundred thousand. The reader may ask who make up this unfortunate class, and under what circumstances did they become enthralled by such a habit?
This impatience of continued application to work, which is common to all opium-eaters, and which does not cease with the abandonment of the habit, seems to result in the first case from some specific relation between the drug and the meditative faculties, promoting a state of habitual reverie and day-dreaming, utterly indisposing the opium-user for any occupation which will disturb the calm current of his thoughts, and in the other, proceeding from the direct disorder of the nervous organization itself.
Joseph Cottle over the case of his unhappy friend Coleridge. The book has been compiled for opium-eaters, and to their notice it is urgently commended.
Opium-eaters differ so widely every new case furnishing some marked idiosyncrasy which may demand an entirely different management and list of remedies from those required by the last one that for any general scheme of treatment a week's study of the patient will be necessary.
These letters caused him a sensation analogous to that which gives repose to opium-eaters, a cruel shock at first, sharp as the prick of a knife, then, the pain slowly dying away, a heavy stupor.
Opium-eaters are made such, not by the physician's prescription of opium to patients in whose cases its use is indispensable, but by their not giving together with such prescriptions emphatic and earnest caution that the remedy is not to be taken except when specially ordered, in consequence of the hazard that a habit may be formed which it will be difficult to break.
As the most enlightened and communicative of the opium-eaters has observed: "Happiness may be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat pocket; portable ecstasy may be had corked up in a pint bottle; peace of mind may be set down in gallons by the mail-coach."
They, like opium-eaters, all sink into poverty, whereas if they had been kept up to the mark by the stern demands of life, they might have been great men. At the same time, these half-artists are delightful; men like them and cram them with praise; they even seem superior to the true artists, who are taxed with conceit, unsociableness, contempt of the laws of society.
There has in all ages and climes been a tendency to the improper use of stimulants. Noah, as if disgusted with the prevalence of water in his time, took to strong drink. By this vice Alexander the Conqueror was conquered. The Romans, at their feasts, fell off their seats with intoxication. Four hundred millions of our race are opium-eaters.
It is urged, however, that, even on his philosophic speculations, opium operated unfavorably in one respect, by often causing him to leave them unfinished. This is true. All opium-eaters are tainted with the infirmity of leaving works unfinished, and suffering reactions of disgust. But Coleridge taxed himself with that infirmity in verse before he could at all have commenced opium-eating.
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