Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, April 1885

The desire or craving for stimulants in the most general sense of the word – for drugs acting upon the nerves whether as excitant or sedative agents – is an almost if not absolutely universal human appetite; so general, so early developed, that we might almost call it an instinct. Alcohol, of course, is the most popular, under ordinary circumstances the most seductive, and by far the most widely diffused of all stimulant substances. From the Euphrates to the Straits of Dover, the vine has been from the earliest ages second only to corn in popular estimation; wine, next to bread, the most prized and most universal article of human food. The connection between Ceres and Bacchus is found in almost every language as in the social life of every nation, from the warlike Assyrian monarchy, the stable hierocratic despotism of Egypt, to the modern French Republic and German Empire. Corn itself has furnished stimulant second in popularity to wine alone; the spirit which delighted the fiercer, sterner races of Northern Europe – Swede, Norwegian, and Dane, St. Olaf, and Harold Hardrada, as their descendants of to-day; and the ale of our own Saxon and Scandinavian ancestry, which neither spirit, cider, nor Spanish wine has superseded among ourselves. The vine, again, seems to have been native to America; but the civilized or semi-civilized races of the southern and central part of the Western Continent had other more popular and more peculiar stimulants, also for the most part alcoholic. The palm, again, has furnished to African and Asiatic tribes a spirit not less potent or less noxious, not less popular and probably not less primitive, than whiskey or beer. But where alcohol has been unknown, among races to whose habits and temperament it was alien, or in climates where so powerful an excitant produced effects too palpably alarming to be tolerated by rulers or law-givers royal or priestly, other and milder stimulants or sedatives are found in equally universal use. Till the white man introduced among them his own destructive beverages, till the “fire-water” spread demoralization and disease, tobacco was the favorite indulgence of the Red Indian of North America, and very probably of that mighty race which preceded them and seems to have disappeared before they came upon the scene – the Mound-builders, whose gigantic works bear testimony to the existence of an agriculture scarcely less advanced or less prolific, a despotism probably not less absolute than that of Egypt. Coffee has for ages been almost equally dear to the Arabs; tea has been to China all that wine is and was to Europe, probably from a still earlier period, and has taken hold on the Northern, as coffee and tobacco upon the Southern, branches of the Tartar race. Opium, or drugs resembling opium in character, have been found as well suited to the temper, as delightful to the taste, of the quieter and more passive Oriental races as wine to the Aryan and Semitic nations. The Malays, the Vikings of the East Indies, found in bhang a drug the most exciting and maddening in its effects of any known to civilized or uncivilized man; a substitute for opium or haschisch bearing much the same relation to those sedatives as brandy or whiskey to the light wines of Southern Europe.

The craving, then, is not artificial but natural; is not, as teetotalers fancy, for alcohol alone or primarily, but for some form of nervous excitement or sedative specially suited to climate or race. Tea, coffee, and tobacco, opium, haschisch and bhang, mata and tembe, are probably as old as wine, older than beer, and take just as strong a hold upon the national taste. The desire testifies to a felt and almost universal want; and the attempt to put down a habit proved by universal and immemorial practice to answer to a need, real and absolute – or if artificial easily created and permanent, if not ineradicable, beyond any other artificial craving or habit – seems doomed to failure; the desire not being for this or that stimulant, for wine or alcohol, but for some agent that gives a special satisfaction to the nerves, some stimulant, sedative or astringent. The discouragement of one form of indulgence, especially if that discouragement be artificial or forcible, not moral and voluntary, can hardly have any other result than to drive the votaries of alcohol, for example, upon opium, or those of opium upon some form of alcohol. Tea, coffee, and tobacco have done infinitely more than teetotal and temperance preaching of every kind to diminish the European consumption of wine, beer, and spirits. Men and even women never have been and never will be content with water or milk, or even with the unfermented juices of fruits; to say nothing of the extreme difficulty of preserving unfermented juices in those warmer climates to which they are best adapted.

It seems, however, that the natural craving, especially among women, or men not subject to the fiercer excitements of war, hunting, and open air life in general, is not for the stronger but for the milder stimulants. Ale was the favorite beverage of England, light wine of Southern Europe, till the Saracen invasion, the crusades, and finally the extension of commerce, familiarised the Western Aryans with the non-intoxicant stimulants of the East, and the discovery of America introduced tobacco. But the use of tea and coffee is not less, we might say, is more distinctly artificial than that of beer or wine. The taste for tobacco, as its confinement in so many countries and to so great an extent to one sex proves, is the most artificial of all.

It is plain, both from the climates and the character of the races among whom the sedative drugs or slightly-stimulant beverages have first and most widely taken root, that the preference for sedatives or gentle excitants is not accidental, but to a large extent dependent upon the temperament and habits of races or nations. Alcohol suits the higher, more energetic, active, militant races; and the fiercer and more militant the temper or habits, the stronger the intoxicant employed. It is not improbable that the first and strongest incitement to the use of alcohol, as of bhang, was the desire for that which a very unfair and ungenerous national taunt describes as Dutch courage. No race, probably, except their nearest kinsmen of England, was ever less dependent on the artificial boldness produced by stimulants than the stubborn soldiers and seamen of Holland. The beer-loving Teutons have never been, like the wine-drinkers of France, Italy, and Spain, a military, or even, like the Scandinavians, a thoroughly martial race. They will fight: none, Scandinavians, Soudanese, and Turks perhaps excepted, fight better or more stubbornly. It may well be that the adventurous, enterprising spirit of Englishmen and Scotchmen, displayed at sea rather than on land, and in semi-pacific quite as much as in warlike enterprise, is derived in large measure from the strong Scandinavian element in our national blood. The tea-drinking Chinamen, the Oriental lovers of haschisch and opium, have mostly been industrious rather than energetic, agricultural or pastoral rather than predatory. The coffee-drinking Arabs were not, till the days of Mahomet, a specially warlike race. Bandits or guerillas they were perforce; like every people which inhabits a country whose mountains or deserts afford a safe refuge to robbers but promise no reward to peaceful industry. No race, no class living in the open air, save in the warmer climates, no people given to energetic muscular labor or devoted to war, would be prompt to abandon alcohol in any of its forms for its milder Oriental equivalents. Tea and coffee were introduced at a time when manufactures and in-door-life were gaining ground in Western Europe and found favor first, as is still the case, with the indoor-living sex. It is still among indoor workers that they are most in vogue. But if, as seems likely, alcohol was first adopted by the warriors of savage or semi-savage races as an inspiring or hardening force, it early lost this character with the introduction of strict military discipline on the one hand or of chivalry on the other. Neither the trained soldier of the phalanx and the legion, nor the knight with whom reckless but also intelligent courage was a point of honor, could find any help in intoxication, partial or total; nay, he soon found that while the first excitement of alcohol was fatal to discipline, its subsequent effects were almost as injurious to the persevering, steadfast kind of courage in which he put his pride. Wine or brandy, then, came to be the indulgence of peace and triumph, not of war; wassail followed on victory, sobriety was necessary till the victory was won. But still it has always been on the sterner, fiercer, more energetic races that alcohol, and especially the stronger forms of alcohol, retained their hold. It is to the passive, quiet, reflective temperaments – national or individual, peculiar to classes or to crafts – that tea or coffee, opium or haschisch, substances that calm rather than excite the nerves, have always proved strongly and often dangerously attractive.

Now it may be urged with plausibility, and perhaps with truth, that civilization and intellectual culture, the exchange of out-door for in-door life, the influences that have rendered intelligence and dexterity of more practical value than corporeal strength, tend in some sense and in some measure to Orientalize the most advanced European races. We are not, perhaps, less daring or less enterprising than our fathers; but there is a large and ever increasing class to which strenuous physical exertion is neither habitual nor agreeable. We are unquestionably becoming sedentary; we work much more with our brains, much less with our muscles, than heretofore. With this change has come a decided change of feeling and tastes. We shrink from the fierce excitement, the violent moral stimulants that delighted ruder and less sensitive races and generations. The gladiatorial shows of Rome, the savage sports and public punishments of the Middle Ages, would be simply revolting to the great majority of almost every European nation of to-day; not primarily because as thoughtful Christians we deem them wicked, but because, instinctively, as sensitive men and women in whom imagination and sympathy are strong, we shudder at them as brutal. Prize-fights, bear-baiting, bull-fights have become too rough, too coarse, but above all too exciting; the hideous tragedies of old have ceased to suit the taste at least of our cultivated classes. In one word, our nerves are far too sensitive to crave for strong and violent excitement, moral or physical; it is painful rather than pleasurable. The sobriety of the educated classes is due much less to moral than to social causes. It is not that strong wines and spirits are so much more injurious to us than to our grandsires, nor that we have learned in fifty years to think intoxication sinful; rather we have come to despise it, and to dislike its means, because we have ceased to feel or understand the craving for such violent stimulation, because not merely the reaction but the excitement itself gives more pain than pleasure.

In the case of our American kinsmen climate has very much to do with the matter. A dry, keen, exhilarating air as well as an intense nervous sensibility renders powerful alcoholic stimulants unnecessary, over-exciting, unpleasant as well as injurious. Partly from temperament, a temperament which in itself must be largely the result of climate, partly from the direct influence of their drier, keener atmosphere, American women feel no need of alcohol; American men who do indulge in it, rather as a relief from brain excitement than as an excitant itself, suffer far more than we do from the indulgence. The number of drunkards or hard-drinkers in the older States is, we believe, very much smaller than in England, even at the present day. But the proportion of lunatics made by drink seems to be much larger. In America alone teetotalism has been the serious object of social and legislative coercion. The Maine Liquor Law failed; but it is enforced in garrisons and colleges, while in many States social feeling and sectarian discipline forbid wine and spirits to women and clergymen, and habitual indulgence therein, however moderate, is hardly compatible with a high reputation for religious principle or strict morality. But this case, like that of the early Mahometans, is the case of a people whose climate is unsuited to alcohol; whose very atmosphere is a stimulant.

In a word, the craving of to-day, moral and physical, especially among the cultivated classes, among the brain-workers, among those of the softer sex and of the fruges consumere nati, who are almost entirely relieved from physical labor, is for mild prolonged stimulation, and for stimulation which does not produce a strong reaction; or else for sedatives which will allay the sleepless excitement produced by over-work, or yet oftener, perhaps, by reckless pursuit of pleasure.

It seems, then, not unnatural or improbable that, as tea and coffee have so largely taken the place of beer or light wine as beverages, so narcotics should take the place of stronger alcoholic stimulants. That this has been the case in certain quarters is well known to physicians, and to most of those who have that experience of life in virtue of which it is said, “every man of forty must be a physician or a fool.” Nay, it is difficult to read the newspapers and remain ignorant or doubtful of the fact. We read weekly of men and women poisoned by an over-dose of some favorite sedative, burnt to death, or otherwise fatally injured while insensible from self-administered ether or chloroform. For one fatal case that finds its way into the newspapers there are, of course, twenty fatal in a different sense – fatal, not to life, but to life’s use and happiness – that are never known beyond the family circle, into which they have introduced unspeakable and often almost unlimited sorrow and evil; unlimited, for no one can be sure, few can reasonably hope, that the mischief will be confined to the individual victim of a dangerous craving. That the children of drunkards are often pre-disposed to insanity is notorious; that the children of habitual opium-eaters or narcotists inherit an unmistakable taint, whether in a diseased brain, in diseased cravings, or simply in a will too weak to resist temptation of any kind, is less notorious but equally certain. Of these secondary victims of chloral or opium there are not as yet many; but many fathers and mothers – fathers, perhaps, who for the sake of wives and children have overtaxed their brains till nothing but either the rest which circumstances and family claims forbid, or drugs, will give them the sleep necessary to the continuance of their work; mothers, too commonly, who begin by neglecting their children in the pursuit of pleasure, to end by poisoning their unborn offspring in the struggle to escape the consequences of that pursuit – are preparing untold misery and mischief for a future generation. Happily, narcotism is not the temptation of the young or energetic. It is later in life, when the effect of years of brain excitement of whatever nature begins to tell, and generally after the period in which the greater number of children are born, that men and women give way to this peculiar temptation of the present age.

The immediate danger to themselves is sufficiently alarming, if only it were ever realized in time. The narcotist keeps chloroform or chloral always at hand, forgetful or ignorant that one sure effect of the first dose is to produce a semi-stupor more dangerous than actual somnolence. In that semi-stupor the patient is aware, or fancies that the dose has failed. The pain that has induced a lady to hold a chloroformed handkerchief under her nostrils returns while her will and her judgment are half paralysed. She takes the bottle from the table beside her bed, intending to pour an additional supply on the handkerchief. The unsteady hand perhaps spills a quantity on the sheet, perhaps sinks with the unstoppered bottle under her nostrils; and in a few moments she has inhaled enough utterly to stupefy if not to kill. The vapor, moreover, is inflammable; perhaps it catches the candle by her side; and she is burnt to death while powerless to move. The sleepless brain-worker also feels that his usual dose of chloral has failed to bring sleep; he is not aware how completely it has stupefied the brain, to which it has not given rest. His judgment is gone, so is his steadiness of hand; and, whether intentionally or not, at any rate unconsciously, so far as reasoning and judgment are concerned, he pours out a second and too often a fatal dose. Any one who knows how great is the stupefying power of these drugs, how often they produce a sort of moral coma without paralysing the lower functions of animal or even of mental life, would, one might suppose, at least take care to be in bed before the drug takes effect, and if possible to put it out of reach till next morning. But experience shows how seldom even this obvious and essential precaution is taken.

The cases that end in a death terrible to the family, but probably involving little or no suffering to the victim himself, are by no means the worst. A life poisoned, paralysed, rendered worthless for all the uses of intellectual, rational, we might almost say of human existence, is worse for the sufferer himself and for all around him than a quick and painless death; and for one such death there must be twenty if not a hundred instances of this worst death in life. In nine cases out of ten, probably, the narcotist has been entangled almost insensibly, but incurably, without intention and almost without consciousness of danger. With alcohol this could hardly be the case. No woman, at any rate, could reach the point at which secret indulgence in wine or spirits became a habit and a necessity without warnings, evidences of excess palpable to herself if not to others, that should have terrified and shamed her into self-control, while self-control was yet possible. The hold that opium and other narcotics acquire is at once swifter, more gradual, less revolting and incomparably stronger than that of alcohol. The first indulgence is in some sense legitimate; is almost enforced, either by acute pain or by chronic insomnia. The latter is perhaps the more dangerous. The pain, if it last for weeks, forces recourse to the doctor before the habit has become incurable. Sleeplessness is a more persistent, and to most people a much less alarming thing; and it is moreover one with which the doctors can seldom deal save through the very agents of mischief. Neuralgia, relieved for a time by chloroform or morphia, may be cured by quinine; sleeplessness admits of hardly any cure but such complete change of life as is rarely possible, at least to its working victims. And the narcotist habit once formed, neither pain nor sleeplessness is all that its renunciation would involve. The drunkard, it must be remembered, gets drunk, as a rule, but occasionally. Save in the last stages of dipsomania, he can do, if not without drink, yet without intoxicating quantities of drink, for days together. The narcotist who attempts to go for a whole day without his accustomed dose, suffers in twenty-four hours far more cruelly than the drunkard deprived of alcohol in as many days. The effect upon the stomach and other organs, upon the nerves as well as on the brain, is one of indescribable, unspeakable discomfort amounting to torture; a disorder of the digestive system more trying than sea-sickness, a disorganization of the nerves which after some hours of unspeakable misery culminates in convulsive twitchings, in mental and physical distress, simply indescribable to those who have not felt it. Where attempts have been made forcibly and suddenly to withhold the accustomed sedative, they have not unfrequently ended within a few days in madness or death. In other cases the victim has sought and obtained relief by efforts and through hardships which, in his or her best days, would have seemed impossible or unendurable. One woman thus restrained escaped in a déshabille from her bed-room on a winter night of Arctic severity; ran for miles through the snow, and was fortunate enough to find a chemist who knew something of the fearful effect of such privation, and had the sense and courage to give in adequate quantity the poison that had now become the first necessary of life. In a word, narcotics, one and all, are, to those who have once fallen under their power, tyrants whose hold can hardly ever be shaken off, which punish rebellion with the rack, and with all those devices of torture which mediæval and ecclesiastical cruelty found even more terrible than the rack itself; while the most absolute submission is rewarded with sufferings only less unendurable than the punishment of revolt. De Quincey’s dreams under the influence of opium were to the tortures of resistance what the highest circle of purgatory may be to the lowest pit of the Inferno. But any reader who knows what nightmare is would think such tortures of the imagination, so vividly realized by a consciousness apparently intensified rather than impaired by slumber, a sufficient penalty for almost any human sin.

Chloral, bromide of potash, chloroform, henbane, and their various combinations and substitutes are, however, by their very natures medicines and no more. They are taken in the first instance as such; at worst as medicinal equivalents for a quantity of alcohol which women are afraid to take or unable to obtain, much more commonly as medicines originally useful, mischievous only because the system has been accustomed to depend on and cannot dispense with them. Their effects at best are negatively, not actively, pleasurable. They relieve pain or insomnia, or the craving which they themselves have created; but their victims would, if they could, gladly be released from their tyranny. Their character, moreover, is if not immediately yet very rapidly perceptible. Very few can have used them for six months without becoming more or less alarmed by the consequences. The minority, for whom they are mere substitutes for alcohol, resort to them only when the system has already been poisoned, the habits incurably vitiated. With opium the case is different. In those which may be called its native countries, it is not a medicine but a stimulant or sedative, used for the most part in much greater moderation but in the same manner as wine or spirits among ourselves; as an indulgence pleasurable and innocent, if not actually desirable in itself. It suits the climates and temperaments to which the heating, exciting influence of alcohol is wholly unsuitable. It is, moreover, incompatible with the free use of the latter, a thing which may be said in some sense of most narcotics. Taken up by persons not yet addicted to intemperance, chloral and similar drugs operate to discourage the use, or at least the free use, of wine or spirits by intensifying their effect to a serious and generally an unpleasant degree. But it does not appear that they act, like opium, to indispose the system for alcohol. To the opium-eater, as a rule, the exciting stimulus of alcohol, counteracting the quiet, dreamy influence of his favorite drug, is decidedly obnoxious; the action of chloral much more resembles that of the more stupefying and powerful spirits. A drunkard desirous to abandon his favorite vice, and reckless or incredulous of the possibility that the remedy may be worse than the disease, would probably find in opium the most powerful and effectual assistance and support to which he could have recourse. It has moreover a strong tendency to diminish the appetite for food, so much so that both in the East and in Europe severe privation tends to encourage and diffuse its use.

Its peculiar danger, however, lies in the nature of the pleasure, and the remoteness of the pain and mischief which attend its use. Its effect on different constitutions and at different periods of life is exceedingly different. As De Quincey remarks, it is not essentially and primarily narcotic. It does not necessarily, immediately, or always produce sleep. Some fortunate temperaments reject it in all forms whatever. With these it produces immediate or speedy nausea, and consequent repugnance. But its most universal effect is the diffusion of comfort, quiet, calm, conscious repose, a general sensation of physical and mental ease throughout the system; not followed necessarily or generally by acute reaction, or even by depression. De Quincey’s earlier experience accords with that of most of those to whom opium is in some sense suited, to whom alone it is likely to become a dangerous temptation. Used once in a fortnight, or even once a week, it gives several hours of placid enjoyment, and if taken with some mild aperient and followed next morning by a cup of strong coffee, it generally gives a quiet night’s rest, entailing no further penalty than a certain not unpleasant lassitude on the morrow. A working-man, for instance, might take it every Saturday night for twenty years without other effect than a decided aversion to the public-house on Sunday, if he could but resist the temptation to take it oftener. Again, till it loses its power by constant use it is in many cases the surest and pleasantest of all anæsthetics; it relieves all neuralgic pains, tooth-ache and ear-ache for example, and puts, especially in combination with brandy, a quick and sure if by no means a wholesome check on the milder forms of diarrhœa.