Whether to annoy the reader with the history of my repeated attempts and failures, that is the question: for that I did attempt to throw off my shackles, honestly and earnestly, I would have the reader fairly believe.

Yet why traverse again step by step this sad pilgrimage; the reader has read similar experiences; then why trouble him with mine? Simply because in the lives of all persons there is some variation, one from another; and besides this, though I have taken some pains to read fully our opium literature, as I may properly term it, I must say that I have found it in a very demoralizing condition. That is, it does the reader, with reference to opium, more harm than good—and much more. I know this from experience, and it is one of the moving reasons why this personal history is written.

I might tire the reader’s patience over and again, by recounting my frequent attempts to throw off the accursed incubus, but shall content myself with briefly referring to such as may benefit the public, and especially those who are in danger from opium, but who as yet have not passed beyond recovery. The first attempt of any real interest I made about one year after the commencement of my unfortunate medical treatment, which resulted in fastening the habit upon me.

In order that I might be as well advised in the undertaking as convenient, I called upon a veteran physician, as well as opium eater, of the place for information and counsel. One of the consequences attending previous attempts had been diarrhoea, and a general upsetting of all the gastric functions. I did not know why this was, or that it attended all cases necessarily.

The physician gave me a great deal of information, which, taking it simply as a much better knowledge of my condition, rallied and cheered my spirits considerably. In referring to the diarrhoea, he said that it invariably followed; that leaving off the opium unlocked all the secretions, and the diarrhoea was a natural consequence. I was not using much morphia at this time. The quantity was indeed so small that the physician almost ridiculed the idea of my being in the habit at all. I knew better than that, however. He said it was hardly necessary to give anything to check the diarrhoea, in fact, that it was almost useless, and unless it actually became too severe, it was better to let it take its own course; that when it stopped of its own accord I would perceive that I was better. He gave me a few powders to take along, nevertheless, which I did not find it necessary to use.

I stopped square off. The first day I felt meanly and sleepy, and had such an influx of remorseful and melancholy thoughts, and such a complete loss of command over myself, that I could have wept the livelong day,—I felt so crushed and broken-hearted. The second day was similar to the first, except the diarrhoea now set in. On the third day I began to feel more comfortable in some respects, the sleepy, drowsy feeling having passed away; I also had gained a little more command over my feelings, though I was still morbidly sensitive, sad, and broken in spirit, and at a word would have burst into tears. The diarrhoea was rushing off at a fearful rate; but that I did not mind much,—it was carrying away my trouble, and this was what I desired. My stomach and bowels were in an unsettled, surging, and wishy-washy condition, the gastric processes so completely disturbed that my stomach was no stomach, and felt simply like a bottomless pipe that ran straight through me. I describe these phenomena now thus particularly, not because I had not observed them in previous attempts, but because I have not described any other attempts to the reader. I intend, as I proceed with this narrative to describe the effect of morphia at the beginning, and at and up to the time of which I am now writing, and its effect years after, and the phenomena observed and suffering undergone in attempting to abandon its use in the latter years.

The experienced reader will observe, from the attending phenomena which I have so far described, that I was not very deep into it at the period now referred to.

Generally, during the day (to recur to the subject in hand), did my stomach feel like a straight and bottomless pipe, but when I attempted to eat or drink I felt as though it incorporated a volcano; and every time I thought of food its whirling, surging contents threatened an eruption and overflow. Everything eaten seemed perfectly insipid and tasteless, and to fall flat upon the very bottom of my bowels. The region “round about” my epigastrium was in a state of communistic insurrection and rebellion. Nothing digested during this time, or if anything, digestion was very imperfect. Nothing remained in me long enough to pass through a complete process of digestion. I did not become hungry. To eat a meal of victuals was precisely like taking a dose of physic, only much more quick in operation. I experienced constant flushes of heat and cold (hot flushes predominating), and was in a continual perspiration, all the secretions being thrown wide open. My flesh seemed stretched tightly after the third day, and at night my limbs pained me,—principally my legs below the knees. I could do, and did, nothing but stand and gaze vacantly; too nerveless and shattered to attempt any mental labor.

My voice was hollow and weak, and sometimes almost inarticulate. After the fifth day my remorseful and melancholy thoughts and feelings gave way, to some extent, to more cheerful ones. I continued ten days without touching morphia, or anything of the kind. By that time my diarrhoea had ceased, and my stomach about the region of the epigastrium seemed drawn together as tightly as if tied in a knot. I had some appetite for food, though not much, and poor digestion. Everything was still quite tasteless to me. I craved something eternally which seemed absolutely necessary to make up the proper constitution of my stomach:—and of my happiness, also, I should add, for this is the whole truth.

The appetite for morphia, which while I was suffering I was able to control, grew much sharper after I had reached the tenth day, and my pains and physical difficulties had subsided, as it were. This is a point which I have ever observed in my case, namely, that, while undergoing severe pain or suffering, I have had power to resist appetite and carry out my purposes against the habit, but so soon as the pain or strain upon me departed, it left me collapsed in my will and powerless. But, in the instance under consideration, while my stomach was in a disorganized condition, the appetite was not near so strong as when I regained a more natural state, when it returned with an irresistible vigor. I believe the appetite destroys the will as firmly as I do that God exists.

I took a small dose of morphia, thinking I might thus stay the violent cravings of the appetite, and be thereafter clear of it. The time was in the midst of a political campaign; I was in a public office as a clerk; my employer was rendering his fealty to the party that gave him his place, and I was compelled to remain in the office and work. I was suffering in secret, my employer knowing nothing of my thraldom, and I could not work with the accursed appetite raging within me.

The affinity between the brain and the stomach is most plainly demonstrated by the disease of the opium habit; the appetite feeds as much on the brain as on the stomach. I could not work; I could do nothing but look, and that in a blank and dazed way; and being compelled to work, I took a small dose, thinking that would quiet the enemy and give me peace, and that thereafter I could probably worry it through. Cruel illusion! My unhappy fate willed differently, and the peculiar effects of opium can only be learned by bitter experience. I fell prostrate as before, with this difference, that I was less hopeful.

Oh, the melancholy years that have intervened between then and now! Hopeless upon a dark and boundless sea, drifting farther and farther from land! Oh, the youthful aspirations that have been wrecked by, and gone down forever in, this all-swallowing deep!—the mortifications, disappointments, and humiliations that stand out upon this black ocean of despair, and like huge and abortive figures of deformity mock me in my dreams, and taunt me in my waking hours! For I sing only the “pains” of opium; its “pleasures” I have yet to see. For that cannot be accounted a pleasure which is attended with sadness, and that stimulation will not be considered a benefit which is followed by reaction and collapse.

De Quincey says that he never experienced the collapse and depression consequent upon indulgence in opium. The first doses I took, though they stimulated me to the skies, sickened me at the same time, and left me in such a collapsed condition that it required twenty-four hours to completely recover. I do admit that, when one’s sensibilities have become deadened and hardened by long use of opium, when all the fervor is burnt out of one, and it no longer stimulates, or its stimulation is barely perceptible,—that then, indeed, there is not much reaction. But what eater of opium, after taking much of the drug the day previous, ever arose in the morning without feeling unutterably miserable? What would you call this, unless reaction?

“The time has been, my senses would have cool’d
To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir,
As life were in’t.”

And I could not even go into an unlighted room after nightfall without the most terrifying feelings of abject fear. There was not a night came during a certain period without bringing with it the most harrowing and dreadful forebodings of death before morning. I must in justice state that I was using some quinine at this time to break up a fever that was continually attacking me, and that I was then again using morphia by means of the hypodermic syringe (having been induced to adopt that mode by another person who was using it in the same way,—which I found to be much more injurious than taking it per mouth); nevertheless, it was still the opium habit, and it was that which induced the fever, and made necessary the quinine.

No tongue or pen will ever describe—mine shrinks from the attempt, and the imagination of another, without suffering it all, could scarcely conceive it possible—the depth of horror in which my life was plunged at this time; the days of humiliation and anguish, nights of terror and agony, through which I dragged my wretched being. But I am anticipating other and future parts of this narration. It is my intention to disclose, as I proceed, the effects of opium from the first dose, and commencement of the habit, till it reaches its ultimate and final effects, and to describe an attempt to renounce its use at the latter stage.

Still, I have thought it proper, even at this juncture, to give the reader to understand that the opium habit, from first to last, produces nothing but misery,—and that of a kind entirely without hope in this world. This I expect to prove in detail as I proceed.