Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/668

650 opium is an abused, much-abused system. The adults who indulge are, according to my experience, of three classes: There are some who in the course of disease attended with long-continued acute pain, like neuralgia pain, have found relief from opium, and who having so become habituated to its use keep up the habit sometimes because they feel that they can not sleep without the drug, and sometimes because they have learned to experience a real luxury from its use. There is a limited section that has learned the practice of swallowing or of smoking opium from some Eastern association, and is professed in the practice in a certain moderate degree. Lastly, there are a few doubtless among the poorest of the community, who in some particular localities learn to partake of the narcotic, often not being aware of its true nature, and obtaining it under some fanciful name which has no direct reference to the narcotic itself.

To the few who in these classes may be called opium-eaters might be added a small number of alcoholic inebriates who partake of an opiate occasionally with their spirituous potations.

To whichever class they who habitually resort to opium may belong, they pay dearly for their temporary pleasure. They are a miserable set in mind as in body. They are preserved, as it were, in misery; they do not suffer acute diseases from their enemy, as the alcoholics do, by which their lives are abruptly cut short, but they continue depressed in mind, feeble and emaciated in body, and incapable of any long-continued effort. De Quincey, in language somewhat figurative and poetical, has described the class with a force, and on the whole a correctness, which may be accepted as a faithful record.

I can not report even so favorably on the use of absinthe as I have reported above on the use of opium. There can not, I fear, be a doubt that in large and closely packed towns and cities the consumption of absinthe is on the increase. In London it is decidedly on the increase. It is not possible to find a street in some parts of the metropolis in which the word "absinthe" does not meet the eye in the windows of houses devoted to the sale of other intoxicating and lethal drinks. Much of this advertisement of an unusually dangerous poison is made from ignorance of its nature as much as from cupidity. The suggestion for offering absinthe is that it is an agreeable bitter, that it gives an appetite, and that it gives tone to weak digestions. It is proffered much in the same manner as gin and bitters, and as in some private houses sherry and bitters are proffered. If you ask a seller of absinthe what he vends it for, he tells you, "As a tonic to help digestion."

There is no more terrible mistake than this statement. Absinthe as it is made in France, whence it is imported, is a mixture of essence of wormwood (absinthium), sweet-flag, anise-seed, angelica-root, and alcohol. It is colored green with the leaves or the juice of smallage,