CHAPTER VII.

OPIUM.[1]

It may be taken for granted that most people are in some degree acquainted with the use of opium, having had it at some time or other administered to them as a medicine. Dover’s powder, so useful a remedy for a cold, contains opium; Laudanum is a preparation of it which is familiar to everybody; and there are scores of other remedies and proprietary preparations which contain opium to a greater or less extent. But useful as opium may be, it must be used with discretion, and must not be allowed to change its character of a faithful servant for that of a master. It can become an exacting and dominating master, and the habit once formed is well nigh ineradicable.

For the information of those who have not seen the pure drug, I may mention that opium is a dark brown, putty-like substance with an agreeable, sweetish, odour. It is the dried resin obtained by incising the unripe capsules of a certain variety of poppy, and is prepared in large, well-equipped factories, from which it is issued in cakes and balls weighing eighty tolas.[2]

The opium industry is a Government monopoly. The poppy crops are grown under Government supervision, and the factories where it is prepared belong to Government and are staffed by Government servants. The prepared product is sold from Government opium shops from which consumers who are so privileged can get their requirements at a certain fixed price.[3] But as is the case with all monopolized commodities, opium may assume a money value far in excess of its intrinsic worth and be sold for its weight in silver. In fixing the price of opium, Government is confronted with a choice between two courses: either to sell opium cheap, and so extinguish the smuggler; or to prohibit it entirely and thereby convert India into a happy hunting ground for the avaricious and rapacious fortune hunter. It takes a middle course, therefore, and sells opium at such a rate that facilities for obtaining it are reasonable, without, on the one hand, rendering it cheap and easily obtainable, or, on the other, making it prohibitive. The policy pursued is one of eventual suppression; the discouragement of recruits to the opium habit being the means employed as best adapted to bring about its realization.

The opium habit was an established thing in India centuries before the British first set foot in the country, and it is surmised that it was the Arab conquerors, who invaded India in the 11th century who first introduced it. The cultivation of the poppy, and the preparation of opium, were live industries in India in the 16th century, as Portuguese chroniclers tell us, and when the British East India Company took over the administration of Bengal after Clive’s victory at Plassey in 1757, all that they found themselves able to do was to adopt a policy of regulation leading to ultimate suppression. This policy has been followed ever since.

It is a fundamental weakness of human nature that we desire most that which it is most difficult to obtain. It is a perpetuation of the genesiac myth of the forbidden fruit; and no matter how optimistic some may be that the opium habit will eventually be stamped out, it is to be feared that this cannot come about until human nature ceases to be what it always has been. This contention applies with special cogency to the opium habit whose insistence in our midst is not only owing to the fact that it satisfies the sensuousness and voluptuousness which forms a part of every man’s nature, but that it establishes a dominance over its victims which requires almost super-human power of will to overthrow. In a letter to his friend and medical attendant Mr. Gilman, Coleridge, who was for twenty-five years a victim to the opium habit, writes about the giving up of it as a “trivial task” and as requiring no more than seven days to accomplish; yet elsewhere he describes it pathetically, and sometimes with almost frantic pathos, as the scourge, the curse, the one almighty blight which had desolated his life. De Quincey very justly calls this a “very shocking contradiction,” and asks, “Is, indeed, Leviathan _so_ tamed?”

It has been more than once suggested that the dissemination of a healthy propaganda would be the best means of deterring recruits to the opium habit, and that reliance upon the efforts of a strong preventive staff can result only in a diminution of the vice, and not its extinction. On some, such propaganda might have the desired effect; but with others, it may have just that effect which we seek to avoid. There is always a desire to experience new and strange sensations; there are always some who want an unfailing panacea for pain of body or mind; there are always some who long for oblivion. All these things are to be got from opium—the sovereign panacea for pain, grief, “for all human woes”; a weaver of dreams and ecstasies! And so, with the personal equation always solving itself, the problem remains to all intents and purposes unsolvable.

Let us see what the effects of opium are. A writer on the subject says, “A small dose not unfrequently acts as a stimulant: there is a feeling of vigour, a capability of severe exertion, and an endurance of labour without fatigue. A large dose often exerts a calming influence with a dreamy state in which images and ideas pass rapidly before the mind without fatigue, and often in disorder, and without apparent sequence. Time seems to be shortened as one state of consciousness quickly succeeds another, and there is a pleasant feeling of grateful rest. This is succeeded by sleep which, according to the strength of the dose, and the idiosyncrasy of the person, may be light and dreamy, or like normal profound sleep, or deep and heavy, passing into stupor or coma. From this a person may awaken with a feeling of depression, or langour, or wretchedness, often associated with sickness, headache, or vomiting.” I have verified these statements by questioning numerous consumers of opium, and, in substance, their descriptions tallied exactly with that I have quoted.

How the opium habit is first contracted is a matter which deserves investigation, but it would seem that the most fertile cause is its injudicious administration in its character of an anodyne. De Quincey, in his “_Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_” tells us that he first took opium for a severe toothache. The poet Coleridge, who, like De Quincey, was a confirmed opium-eater, “began in rheumatic pains”; and if a census of consumers was taken, it would not be surprising to find that eighty _per cent._ of them were first introduced to this “dread agent of unimaginable pleasure and pain” by its being given them for a stomachache, toothache, or some such wrecker of the peace of their mind. The other twenty _per cent._ are the victims of curiosity. The Burman is said to get the taste for opium when he is drugged with it while young, when he is, according to Burmese custom, tattoed from the waist to above his knees.

Nobody needs to be told that a habit is formed by the frequent repetition of acts or indulgences, and that some habits are more difficult to break ourselves of than others. The opium habit falls in this category. It is formed, of course, in the same way as other habits, but there are peculiarities connected with it on which those who are ready to condemn opium-eaters as degenerates might well ponder. The physiological effects of opium are such, that the wearing off of the effects of a dose are attended with the keenest mental and physical distress. No one who has not been an opium-eater can describe these adequately. The need, therefore, for a corrective of this condition becomes what seems an urgent necessity, and the only immediate corrective is “a hair from the dog.” A succession of these “hairs”—and a not very long succession—forms the habit. Unlike other habits, it is a habit that cannot be cured without immense strength of will, and a readiness to undergo great suffering: pains in the body, diarrhœa, and a general upset of the mental equilibrium. We see, therefore, that the cause of the habit lies here: _the need for opium to alleviate the pangs caused by opium_.

Amongst unromantically inclined people of the type who form the bulk of consumers—cultivators, coolies, artisans of all kinds, humble folk whose creed is “pice and rice”—it would be difficult (and ludicrous) to suppose that their object in taking opium is to go in their dreams to:

“Woods that wave o’er Delphi steep Isles, that crown the Aegian deep, Fields that cool Ilissus’ laves Or where meander’s amber waves In lingering lab’rinths creep.”

Possibly, they do have pleasant dreams; but the exertion and hard exercise they must undergo to earn their daily bread is known to counteract the sedative effects of opium; and as they take small quantities only, its effect is to stimulate them rather than to make them dreamy and sensuous; and I contend that, _primâ facie_, it is not to evoke sensuous imaginings that these people take opium. They take it because they cannot get away from it, once the pain to ease which it was given has passed. What strength of will do we expect to find in an unlettered cooly?

Without any apology I reproduce here some verses which appeared in 1894, about the time when the Royal Opium Commission came to India:

THE OPIUM-EATER’S SOLILOQUY.

They began by mourning over my degraded moral state, Then my physical decadence they would anxiously debate. Then they raised a pious eye, And they heaved a pitying sigh, And they shuddered as they pondered on my melancholy fate.

Now, I never had reflected on the matter thus, at all, For my luxuries were few, and my expenditure was small. I was happy as the day, In my own abandoned way, Till they said they must release me from the bonds that held me thrall.

I’d been cheered up at my _Chandoo_[4] shop, for years at least two score, To perform my daily labour, and was never sick or sore; But they said this must not be; So they passed a stern decree, And they made my _Chandoo_ seller shut his hospitable door.

Now they’re sending out Commissions with the philanthropic view Of inducing us to part with sev’ral crores of revenue; For all opium traffic’s sin, And, although it brings in tin, Our nefarious trade papaverous, they say we must eschew.

Who’d have thought that my redemption would have cost so many lakhs (For they saddle their expenses on my fellow-subjects’ backs). What with deficits to square, And Commissions everywhere, On the “hoarded wealth of India” I shall prove a heavy tax.

If I’d only cultivated, now, a taste for beer or gin, Or had learnt at Pool or Baccarat my neighbour’s coin to win, I could roam abroad o’ nights, And indulge in these delights, And my soul would not be stigmatized as being steeped in sin!

But as mine’s a heathen weakness for a creature-comfort, far Less pernicious than their alcohol, more clean than their cigar, They have sent their howlings forth, From their platform in the North, And ’twixt me and my poor pleasures have imposed a righteous bar!