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Updated: June 28, 2025
Ten years' grace was allowed, at the end of which period there was to be no more opium-smoking in the empire. One awkward feature was that the Empress Dowager herself was an opium-smoker; the difficulty, however, was got over by excluding from the application of the edict of 1906 persons over sixty years of age.
Leaving Delhi in October, 1808, Elphinstone reached Kanun, where the desert commences, and then the Shekhawuttée, a district inhabited by Rajpoots. At the end of October the embassy arrived at Singuana, a pretty town, the rajah of which was an inveterate opium-smoker. He is described as a small man, with large eyes, much inflamed by the use of opium.
He was an opium-eater rather than an opium-smoker; and he ate the ash from the opium-pipe, instead of the opium itself the most vicious of the methods of taking opium. He was the nearest approach I saw in China to the Exeter Hall type of opium-eater, whose "wasted limbs and palsied hands" cry out against the sin of the opium traffic.
Half an hour after Miska had disappeared into the little house near the corner, the hidden door in the damp cellar below "The Pidgin House" opened and a bent old woman, a ragged, grey-haired and dirty figure, walked slowly up the rickety wooden stair and entered a bare room behind and below the shop and to the immediate left of the den of the opium-smoker.
But for my Yunnan coolie I wrote a good letter most willingly in spite of the fact that he was a confirmed opium-smoker; in all the long journey that he made with me I could not see that it weakened his wits or his muscles. I was told that such journeyings were not at all uncommon, the coolies taking work wherever offered, and going on and on as new jobs turned up.
Assuming that the whole of this quantity was injected the amount taken would be forty five-hundredths, or about one twelfth of a grain. The ordinary medicinal dose of strophanthin is one five-hundredth of a grain. "'I also found in the body appreciable traces of morphine the principal alkaloid of opium from which I infer that the deceased was a confirmed opium-smoker.
In short, the opium-smoker, instead of being a sort of "good fellow with human weaknessess" and with possibilities, of course, of going utterly to wreck has become an object of contempt, a bad citizen. The earnestness of the people has been strikingly illustrated in the great financial sacrifices made by farmers and landowners in sections where the opium poppy was formerly grown.
The opium-smoker and the rum-drinker pay as much for the indulgence of their appetites, under existing circumstances, as they would do, were the privilege of supplying them farmed out to individuals, who would be responsible to the Authorities for the good conduct of their establishments.
But life is a stern thing and the sense of duty the only safe guide. So I steeled my heart, and from my elevated position on the bridge I ordered the men to fling themselves upon him in a body. The elderly serang, emitting a strange, inarticulate cry, gave the example. He was an excellent petty officer very competent, indeed, and a moderate opium-smoker.
At last, she had realized the strength of the glamour. She fought against it; nevertheless, in imagination gave herself up to it, as the opium-smoker or haschisch-eater gives himself up to the insidious FANTASIA of his drug. Yes, Bridget thought it was like what she had read of the effects of some unholy drug some uncanny form of hypnotism.
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