DR. RICHARDSON ON NARCOTICS.
THE Contemporary Review did, we think, a considerable service to English society, in publishing the collated opinions of eminent physicians upon the effects of alcohol. The opinions were so reasonable and moderate, and in some cases so definite, that they helped to solidify the mass of vague impressions floating in society, and to give people clear ideas as to what constitutes " moderation " in the use of alcohol. They made it nearly certain, with all reasoning men, that wine in excess of one semi-bottle of claret daily is injurious excess, though, to the majority of men, that amount may be innocuous, or even, in a proportion of cases, beneficial. We wish the Contemporary would now perform the same service, though, perhaps, in a shorter and more condensed form, as regards the use of narcotics, which is spreading, and is, we believe, most dangerous. Dr. Richardson's paper issued in their columns this month, though very readable and entertaining, is neither satisfactory nor con- vincing. It is not satisfactory, because he says too little about the real question, the moderate use of narcotics, and because he mixes up with his argument the tobacco question, which is separate; and it is not convincing, because ho ignores certain masses of well- known facts. When, for example, he says that alcohol is the natural antidote to tobacco, and that total abstainers " find that smoking seriously taxes their physical health, and most of them in due time forego even the luxury of the weed," he is surely generalising very broadly from very narrow data. We speak on good evidence, when we say that alcohol with tobacco dis- solved iu it is about as injurious a liquor as it is possible to swallow ; that, in some constitutions, tobacco distinctly increases the stupefying effect of alcohol ; and that some English total abstainers, at all events, seem quite imper- vious to the ill-effects of smoking. And Dr. Richard- son must be aware that the teetotal races smoke hard. The Turk and the Arab, hereditary teetotallers, are always smoking, and their nerve at all events remains uninjured, while all races in India abjure alcohol and smoke incessantly from childhood, women as well as men. These races do not seem to suffer, many of them being splendid specimens of humanity, though they have never in their lives seen alcohol in any of its forms. So again, Dr. Richardson dismisses far too contemptuously one of the most important of the Temperance questions,—whether total abstinence is not apt to end in the use of some dangerous narcotic, opium more especially. He says : —" As to the assertion that those who are by their pledge re- moved from the use of alcoholic drinks, who are professed abstainers, are more addicted to opium-eating than alcoholic drinkers, the idea is too absurd, and can only have been suggested for the sake of the mischief that might follow a promulgation of the notion, that because one devil is cast out of a man, another must enter that is worse than the first. The facts really tell all the other way. The facts in the main are that those men and women who from principle abstain from one form of intoxicant, most resolutely abjure all forms ; and that those who indulge in one form, are more apt than the rest to indulge in more than one. In the course of my career, I have met with some persons of English society who have indulged in the use of opium; but I have never met one such who did not also take wine, or some other kind of alcoholic drink." In two cases of opium-eating which we have known well, the victims, one a man and the other a woman, both English, were total abstainers from alcohol ; and we have reason to believe that in parts of England, at all events, laudanum is much drunk by women instead of alcohol, just because they can get the one secretly and not the other. At all events, the un-
questionable fact that in Asia the opium-eaters are not, as a rule, drinkers, is quite fatal to Dr. Richardson's very broad proposition that the man who has the one crave almost invari- ably has the other. He himself has admitted that in ono locality which he examined he found teetotallers in the habit of swallowing stupefying doses of ether, and we believe he will find that doctors who have experimented in the cure of habitual drunkards through moderate doses of opium, have found the new desire rapidly and dangerously develope. In denying, moreover, the extent of the use of opium in England, he should give more facts. No practice is more secret, and none on which it is so difficult to get information. If, how- ever, he would ask the manufacturers of laudanum and morphia as to the extent and nature of the demand for their drug, and add to that inquiry a little friendly cross-examination of the lower grade of country chemists, he would, we think, see reason to modify his opinion. We are afraid to state the quantity of laudanum which one wholesale chemist informed us he sent annually to his Lincolnshire customers, but his statement would amaze Dr. Richardson. It may be all given to the children, but that is not the chemist's opinion. There are, moreover, as Dr. Richardson should be aware, " opium-eaters " who take marvel- lously small doses, who find themselves affected by the morphia lozenge of the pharmacopoeia, containing only one thirty- sixth of a grain, and who can carry their poison in their waist- coat-pockets. Beyond a slow but certain loss of appetite, what is the effect of such minute doses,—that is what the foolish public ought to know.
With Dr. Richardson's main idea, which is evidently that the sale of narcotics should be made more difficult, we heartily sympathise. We cannot see, for instance, why the deadly habit of swallowing absinthe should be allowed to take root among us, as it is doing ; why that dangerous drug, which is a direct cause of epilepsy and of the most injurious brain-affections, while it has absolutely no beneficial effect which quinine has not, should not at once be placed among ordinary poisons. There is no vested interest as yet in its manufacture. Its import is not yet large. Its sale supports uo one. Its use is not defended by any political body like the publicans. An Act of two lines would probably suppress its sale altogether ; whereas, if it once takes the hold here that it has done in France, it may be im- possible to undo the mischief. We believe, also, that the terrible effect of chloral, on the character as well as the body, ought to bo made much more public. Thousands of people think it a most innocent relief from " nervousness." It enfeebles the will
quite as much as opium, and the taste for it increases more rapidly. Chloralism, in a sufficiently developed form to call for a physician's assistance, may be uncommon ; but chloralism in a minor form is, unfortunately, very prevalent, and the drug is by no means always taken to procure sleep. It is taken at all times of the day, and there are certainly physicians in London who would not endorse Dr. Richardson's opinion that the prac- tice has not extended among women, but is confined to nervous or over-worked men. It has not, we believe with Dr. Richard- son, reached the poor ; but that only diminishes, and does not extinguish the social danger, increased, we are told on the highest authority, by the occasional use in this country of " very corrupt chlorals." People should know that the drug is as dangerous as opium, and the habit of taking it, except temporarily and under medical advice, given ad hoc, is nothing but a dangerous form of drunkenness. We have known it swallowed in quantities
having a perceptible effect, by people with a most genuine and even fanatic horror of drink.
After all, the great question, which the physicians avoid, always recurs. Why does the human race always and every- where show this proclivity towards the use of drugs which are not nice, like wine, and do not exhilarate like whiskey, but simply enable those who consume them to forget themselves P It is probable that the use of such poisons is exceedingly old. There is a Sanscrit name for opium, and we have been told, but do not for ourselves know, that one of the Vedas gives a recipe for a narcotic of great power ; the Berserkars of the earliest Norse history ate a preparation of hemp, and Dr. Richardson himself gives the following strange account of a practice of classical antiquity :—
" The ancient physicians, dating from Dioscorides himself, toll of the use of a wine made into a narcotic by mandragora. From the loaves and from the root of the Atropa Mandragora the ancient phy- sicians prepared a vinous solution, which in many respects bed the same properties as the chloral hydrate of to-day. This wine, called
=rim,' was given to those who 'were about to bo subjected tt, painful surgical operations or to the cautery, so that are the sensitive structure was touched, the sink man was in a deep sleep, during which the operation was performed without the consciousness of feeling, not to say of pain. The sloop would last for some hours. From this purely medical or surgical use of motion, the application of it extended. Those who were condemned to die by cruel and pro- longed torture were permitted to taste its beneficence, and to pass from their consummate agony through Lethe's walk to death. A little later, and the wino of mandragora was sought after for other and less commendable purposes. There were those who drank of it for taste or pleasure; and who were spoken of mandragorites,' as we might speak of alcoholics or chloralists. They passed into the land of sleep and dream, and waking up in scare and alarm, were the screaming mandrakes of an ancient civilisation. I have myself made the motion' of that civilisation, have dispensed the prescription of Dioscoridos and Pliny. The same chemist, Mr. Banbury, who first put chloral into my hands for experiment, also procured for me the root of the true mandragora. From that root I made the motion, tested it on myself, tried its effects, and re-proved, after a lapse of perhaps four or five centuries, that it had all the properties originally ascribed to it. That it should have come into use as a narcotic by those who first tasted it for its narcotic action, and that they should have passed into mandragorites, is not more surprising than that other and later members of the human family should have become chloralists."
Be it noted that in none of these cases is there the slightest attraction for the palate. Both morphia and arsenic are in Prance made up in ways either attractive or tasteless, but laudanum, the regular English form of opium, is filthy, absinthe is scarcely better, chloral is unattractive, and hemp as nauseous as any other pill. [Coca, the Peruvian drug, is perhaps an exception. We have not seen it, and it is almost unknown in England, but from its extraordinary effect in suspending hunger, it deserves more atten- tion than it has received.] That things so exceedingly nasty and so visibly injurious should still be sought for in all places and ages, points to some deep-seated need which physicians have never yet been able to meet. That need is not sleep only or mainly, for the crave is found in classes which know well the earliest of all truths,—that for sleeplessness there is no remedy to be compared with physical fatigue. The crave may be, as Dr. Richardson suggests, abnormal, or only produced by in- dulgence in the drugs ; but it is strange, if it is so, that it should ever have begun. Is it not at least as probable that the eating of the narcotics, like the use of charms, began when it was necessary for all men to fight, and all men had not the courage, —that narcotics were used first of all to allay fear P That was certainly the first cause for the employment of the extracts of hemp, and is still in the East the main cause for their continued use.
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