Page:James Hudson Maurer - The Far East (1912).pdf/15

 The color leaves his skin and it becomes dry, like parchment.

His eye loses whatever light it may have and becomes dull and listless.

The opium face has been best described as a "peculiarly withered and bloated countenance." With this face is always associated a thin body and a languid gait. Opium gets such a powerful grip on a confirmed smoker that it is actually unsafe for him to give up the habit without medical aid.

His appetite is taken away, his digestion is impaired, there is congestion of the lungs. Constipation and diarrhoea result, with pain all over the body.

By the time he has reached this stage, the smoker has become both physically and mentally weak and inactive.

With his intellect deadened, his physical and moral sense impaired, he sinks into laziness, immorality and debauchery. He has lost his power of resistance to disease, and becomes predisposed to colds, bronchitis, diarrhoea, dysentery and dyspepsia,

When a man has got himself into this condition, he must have opium and must have it all the time.

I have already pointed out that opium smoking not only is perhaps the most expensive of the vices, but that unlike opium eating, it consumes an immense amount of time.

Few smokers can keep slaves to fill their pipes for them. It takes a seasoned smoker from fifteen minutes to half an hour to prepare a pipe to his satisfaction, smoke it, and rouse himself to begin the operation again. If he smokes ten or twenty pipes a day, which is common, and then sleeps off the effects, it is net hard to figure out the number of hours left for business each day. When he has slept and the day is well started, his body at once begins to clamor for more opium. He must begin smoking again, or he will suffer an agony of physical and mental torture. His ten or twenty pipes a day will cost him from one dollar (if he is a poor man and smokes the scrapings from the rich man's pipe) to ten or twenty dollars, or more if he smokes a high grade of opium.

There are many wealthy merchants and officials who smoke from forty to sixty pipes a day.

It is just at this period, when the smoker is so enslaved by the drug that he has lost his earning power, that his opium expenditure increases most rapidly.

He is buying opium now, not so much to gratify