037. The Plague of Narcotics

The Plague of Narcotics

Exo_9:14 : ’93I will at this time send all my plagues upon thine heart, and upon thy servants, and upon thy people.’94

Upon the cleanest, the most fertile, the richest, and the wisest nation of the ancient world, the ten plagues dropped. Plague the first: The river Nile, which was the source of Egyptian fertility and an object of worship, was incarnadined, and rolled its crimson currents amid a horror-stricken population; the reservoir and the costly water-works putrid with destroyed animal life. Plague the second: The frogs innumerable, croaking in the marshes of the Nile, move up and take possession of the homes of a nation which dressed in white and was fastidious for cleanliness; and the storks, the vultures, and the cranes swooping upon their prey. Plague the third: The gnats and mosquitoes buzzed and bit, and stung the people into wild delirium. Plague the fourth: The gadflies became intolerable, or the beetle’97an imitation of which you often see on a gentleman’92s finger, cut in the shape of scarab’e6us, or Egyptian beetle. Plague the fifth: Distemper seized upon the cattle until they went bellowing with pain, and epizooty upon the horses, and trichina upon the swine. Plague the sixth: Carbuncles and elephantiasis inflamed the skin of multitudes. Plague the seventh: Hailstorms, with their icy hammers, smote the earth, and at a season of the year when the cattle were all grazing in the fields and hence were unsheltered from the pelting. Plague the eighth: Locusts, which, according to naturalists, march in companies and regiments and battalions, commanded by captains and colonels and generals, marched across the land until every green thing in orchard and vineyard and garden was destroyed. Plague the ninth: Darkness dropped on all the land and it was as black at twelve o’92clock at noon as at twelve o’92clock at night. Plague the tenth: In every Egyptian home, the oldest, whether on the mother’92s lap or seated at the table, took on the last pallor and expired.

Draw a curtain over every home in Egypt. These ten Egyptian plagues have all passed off the earth, but our modern cities have their ten plagues, blasting, destructive and deathful; and it is my object in a series of Sabbath morning discourses to describe them.

The first plague that I shall mention is the plague narcotic. In all ages the world has sought out some flower or herb or weed to stimulate its lethargy or to compose its grief. A drug called nepenthe was widely used among the ancient Greeks and the ancient Egyptians for narcotic purposes. The Theban women knew how to compound it. You had but to chew the leaves and your sadness was whelmed with hilarity. But nepenthe passed out from the consideration of the world. Next came hasheesh, which is made from Indian hemp. It is manufactured from the flowers at the top, or workmen in leathern clothing walk through the fields of hemp and the exudation from the hemp adheres to the leathern garments, and then this exudation is scraped off and prepared with aromatics and becomes an intoxicant for the people. Whole nations have been stimulated, narcotized, and made imbecile with this accursed hasheesh. The visions kindled by that drug are said to be gorgeous and magnificent beyond all description; but it finally takes down body, mind, and soul in horrible death.

I knew one of the most brilliant men of his day. Whether he appeared in magazine or in book, or in newspaper column, he was an enchantment. He could, in the course of an hour’92s conversation, produce more wit and strange information than any man I ever talked with; but he chewed hasheesh. He did so first as a matter of curiosity, to see whether the powers ascribed to it really belonged to it. He put his hand into the cockatrice’92s den to see whether it would bite, and he found out to his complete undoing. His father, who was a minister of the Gospel, prayed for him and counseled him, and obtained for him the best medical prescription of the best physicians in New York, Philadelphia, Paris, London, Edinburgh, and Berlin. He said he could not stop. A large circle of friends put their wits together to try to rescue him, but he went on down. First, his body gave way in pangs and convulsions of suffering; then his mind gave way, and he became a raving maniac; then his immortal soul went, blaspheming God, into a starless eternity. He was only about thirty years of age. Behold the ravages of the Persian and Egyptian weed called hasheesh.

Opium demands emphatic recognition. It is made, as you know, from the white poppy. It is not a new discovery. We read of it three hundred years before Christ; but it was not until the seventeenth century that it began its death march; passing out from the medicinal and the curative, and by smoking and mastication becoming the scourge of nations. In the year 1861 there were imported into this country one hundred and seven thousand pounds of opium, but last year five hundred and thirty-three thousand pounds of opium. It is estimated that in the year 1876 there were in this country two hundred and twenty-five thousand opium consumers; but I saw a statistic yesterday that said there are probably now in the United States at least five hundred thousand opium consumers. The fact is appalling. Do not think that they are merely barbaric fanatics who go down under that stroke. Read the great De Quincey’92s ’93Confessions of an Opium Eater.’94 He says for the first ten years it gave him the keys of paradise; but it takes his own powerful pen to describe the horrors consequent. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, after conquering the world with his pen, was conquered by opium. The most magnetic and brilliant lawyer of this century fell a victim to its stroke, and there are thousands of men and women’97but more women than men’97who are being bound, body, mind, and soul, to this terrific habit.

There is a great mystery about some families. You do not know why they do not get on. The opium habit is so stealthy, so deceitful, and so deathful. You can cure a hundred drunkards easier than you can cure one opium-eater. I have heard of cases of reformation, but I never saw any. I hope there are cases of genuine reformation. I have seen men who for forty years had been the victims of strong drink thoroughly reformed; but the opium-eaters that I have seen go on and go down. Their cry in the last hour of life is not for God, nor for prayer, nor for the Bible, but for opium. Perhaps there are only two persons outside the household who know what is the matter’97the physician and the pastor; the physician called in for physical relief, the pastor called in for spiritual relief; but they both fail. The physician acknowledges his defeat. The minister of religion acknowledges his defeat, for it seems as if the Lord does not answer prayer for opium-eaters.

O man! O woman! are you tampering with this habit? have you just begun? are you, for the assuagement of physical distresses or mental trouble, making this a regular resource? I beg you stop. The ecstasies at the start will not pay for the horrors at the last. The paradise is followed too soon by the pandemonium. Morphia is a blessing from God for the relief of sudden pang or acute dementia, but was never intended for prolonged use. And what the peculiar sadness of it is, it comes to people in their weak moments. De Quincey says, ’93I took it for rheumatism.’94 Coleridge says, ’93I took it for insomnia or sleeplessness.’94 What do you take it for? For God’92s sake, do not take it too long.

What is remarkable, they are going down from the highest and the wealthiest classes, and from the most fashionable circles of New York and Brooklyn’97going down by hundreds and by thousands. Over twenty thousand opium-eaters in Chicago. Over twenty thousand opium-eaters in St. Louis. In the same proportion, that would make over seventy thousand in New York and Brooklyn. The clerk of the drug store says, ’93I can tell them when they come in. There is something peculiar about their complexion, something peculiar about their nervousness, something peculiar about the look of their eyes that immediately reveals them.’94

In some families chloral is taking the place of opium. Physicians first prescribe it for sleeplessness. Then the patient keeps on because he likes the effect. Whole tons of chloral manufactured in Germany. Baron Liebig says that he knows one chemist in Germany who manufactures a half-ton of chloral every week. There are multitudes being taken down by this habit. Look out for hydrate of chloral! But I am under this head speaking chiefly of opium. You never heard a sermon against opium, but it seems to me there ought to be ten thousand pulpits turned into quaking, flaming, thundering Sinais of warning against this plague narcotic. The devil of morphia in this country will be mightier than the devil of alcohol. But nepenthe and hasheesh and opium and chloral shall not have all the field to themselves.

There sprang up in Yucatan, on this continent, a weed which has bewitched the world. It crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the fifteenth century, and captured Spain. Then it captured Portugal, and then the French ambassadors took it to Paris, and it captured the French empire. Then Walter Raleigh introduced it into England. The botanists ascribe it to the genus nicotiana; but you all know it as the inspiring, the elevating, the emparadising, the radiating, the nerve-shattering, the dyspepsia-breeding, the health-destroying tobacco. I shall not be offensively personal while I speak on this subject, because you all use it, or nearly all! Indeed I know from personal experience how it soothes and roseates the world, and kindles sociality, and I know what are its baleful results. I know what it is to be its slave, and thank God! I know what it is to be its conqueror. I have no expectation that I will persuade the great masses of you to change your habits upon this subject, but I thought I might help you in some advice to your children.

You say, ’93Did not God make tobacco?’94 Oh, yes. You say, ’93Is not God good?’94 Oh, yes. You say, ’93Then God, when he created tobacco, must have created it for some good purpose.’94 Oh, yes; it is good for a great many things’97tobacco is. It is good to kill moths in the wardrobe, and tick in sheep, and to strangulate all kinds of vermin, and to fumigate pestiferous places, and like all other poisons, God created it for some particular use. So he did henbane, so nux vomica, so copperas, so belladonna, so all those poisons which he directly created or had man to extract. But the same God who made the poisons also created us with common sense to know how to use them, and how not to use them.

’93But,’94 say some of my friends, ’93do not people use it without seeming harm to themselves, and are there not cases of plethora which absolutely need this depletion?’94 Oh, yes! Skilful and prudent physicians have sometimes prescribed it just as they sometimes prescribe arsenic, and they prescribe it well. There can be no doubt about its being poisonous. There was a case reported in which a little child lay upon its mother’92s lap, and a drop from her pipe fell on the child’92s lip, and it went into convulsions and into death.

’93But,’94 you say, ’93do not people live on to old age who indulge in this habit?’94 Yes; so I have seen an inebriate seventy years old. There are some persons who, in spite of all the outrages to their physical system, live on to old age. In the case of the man of the jug, he lasted so long because he was pickled! In the case of the man of the pipe, he lasted so long because he was turned into smoked liver!

But, my friends, what advice had we better give to our young people? I say, in the first place, let us advise them to abstain from this habit because all the medical fraternity of the United States and Great Britain pronounce it the cause of widespread and terrific unhealth. Dr. Agnew, Dr. Hamilton, Dr. Olcott, Dr. Barnes, Dr. Woodward, Dr. Rush, Dr. Hosack, Dr. Harvey, Dr. Mott’97all the medical fraternity, allopathic, hom’9copathic, hydropathic, eclectic’97denounce the habit, and warn the community against it. One distinguished physician says: ’93This habit is the cause of seventy different styles of disease. This habit is the cause of nearly all the cases of cancer of the mouth.’94 What is the testimony of the late Dr. John C. Warren, of Boston, than whom there is no higher authority? He says:

For more than thirty years I have been in the habit of inquiring of patients who came to me with cancer of the tongue and lips whether they used tobacco, and if so, whether they chewed or smoked, and if they have sometimes answered in the negative as to the first question, I can truly say that to the best of my knowledge and belief such cases are exceptions to the general rule. When, as is usually the case, one side of the tongue is affected with ulcerated cancer it arises from the habitual retention of the tobacco in contact with this part.

Their united testimony is that it depresses the vitality of the system and brings on nervousness and dyspepsia and takes off twenty-five per cent. of the physical vigor of the people of this country, and damaging this generation damages the next, the accumulated curse going on to capture other centuries. Another eminent physician, for a long while superintendent of the Insane Asylum at Northampton, Mass., says: ’93Fully half of the patients who have come to our asylum for treatment are the victims of tobacco.’94 It is a sad thing, my brother, to damage the body; it is a worse thing to damage the mind, and any man of common sense knows that the nervous system immediately acts upon the brain. More than that: nearly all reformers will tell you that it tends to drunkenness, it creates unnatural thirst. There are those who use this narcotic who do not drink, but nearly all who drink use the narcotic, so that shows there is an immediate affinity between the two drugs. It was long ago demonstrated that a man cannot permanently reform from strong drink unless he gives up tobacco. In nearly all the cases where men having been reformed have fallen back, it has been shown they have first touched tobacco and then surrendered to intoxicants. The broad avenue leading down to the drunkard’92s grave and the drunkard’92s hell is strewn thick with tobacco leaves.

What did Benjamin Franklin say? ’93I never saw a well man in the exercise of common sense who would say that tobacco did him any good.’94 What did Thomas Jefferson say, when arguing against the culture of tobacco? He said: ’93It is a culture productive of infinite wretchedness.’94 Horace Greeley said of it: ’93It is a profane stench.’94 Daniel Webster said: ’93If those men must smoke, let them take the horse-shed.’94

One reason why there are so many the victims of this habit is because there are so many ministers of religion who smoke and chew. They smoke until they get the bronchitis, and the dear people have to pay their expenses to Europe! They smoke until the nervous system breaks down. They smoke themselves to death. I could name three eminent clergymen who died of cancer in the mouth, and in every case the physician said it was tobacco. There has been many a clergyman whose tombstone was all covered up with eulogy, which ought to have had the honest epitaph, ’93Killed by too much cavendish!’94 Some of them smoke until the room is blue, and their spirits are blue, and the world is blue, and everything is blue. Time was when God passed by such sins, but it becomes now the duty of the American clergy who indulge in this narcotic to repent. How can a man preach temperance to the people when he is himself indulging in an appetite like that? I have seen a cuspidor in a pulpit where the minister should drop his cud before he gets up to read, ’93Blessed are the pure in heart,’94 and to read about ’93rolling sin as a sweet morsel under the tongue!’94 and in Leviticus to read about the unclean animals that chew the cud. I have known Presbyteries and General Assemblies and General Synods where there was a room set apart for the ministers to smoke in. Oh, it is a sorry spectacle, a consecrated man, a holy man of God, looking around for something, which you take to be looking for a larger field of usefulness. He is not looking for that at all. He is only looking for some place where he can discharge a mouthful of tobacco juice! I am glad the Methodist Church of the United States, in nearly all their conferences, have passed resolutions against this habit; and it is time we had an anti-tobacco reform in the Presbyterian Church and the Episcopal Church and the Baptist Church and the Congregational Church. About sixty years ago a young man graduated from Andover Theological Seminary into the ministry. He went straight to the front. He had an eloquence and personal magnetism before which nothing could stand; but he was soon thrown into the insane asylum for twenty years, and the doctor said it was tobacco that sent him there. According to the custom then in vogue, he was allowed a small portion of tobacco every day. After he had been there nearly twenty years, walking the floor one day he had a sudden return of reason, and he realized what was the matter. He threw the plug of tobacco through the iron grates and said: ’93What brought me here? what keeps me here? why am I here? Tobacco! Tobacco! O God! help, help, and I’92ll never use it again.’94 He was restored. He was brought forth. For ten years he successfully preached the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and then went into a blissful immortality.

There are ministers of religion today indulging in narcotics, dying by inches, and they do not know what is the matter with them. I might in a word give my own experience. It took ten cigars to make a sermon. I got very nervous. One day I awakened to the outrage I was inflicting upon myself. I was about to change settlements, and a generous wholesale tobacconist in Philadelphia said if I would only come to Philadelphia he would, all the rest of my life, provide me with cigars free of charge. I said to myself, If in these war-times, when cigars are so costly and my salary is small, I smoke more than I ought to, what would I do if I had gratuitous and illimitable supply? And then and there, twenty years ago, I quit once and forever. It made a new man of me, and though I have since then done as much hard work as any one, I think I have had the best health God ever blessed a man with. A minister of religion cannot afford to smoke. Put into my hand the moneys wasted in tobacco in Brooklyn, and I will support three orphan asylums as grand and as beautiful as that to which you have this last week been contributing. Put into my hand the moneys wasted in tobacco in the United States of America, and I will clothe, feed, and shelter all the suffering poor on this continent. The American Church gives a million dollars a year for the evangelization of the heathen, and American Christians spend five millions in tobacco.

Now, I stand this morning not only in the presence of my God, to whom I must give an account for what I say today, but I stand in the presence of a great multitude of young men who are forming their habits. Between seventeen and twenty-three there are tens of thousands of young men damaging themselves irretrievably by tobacco. You either use very good tobacco or cheap tobacco. If you use cheap tobacco, I want to tell you why it is cheap. It is a mixture of burdock, lampblack, sawdust, colts-foot, plantain-leaves, fullers’92 earth, lime, salt, alum, and a little tobacco. You cannot afford, my young friend to take such a mess as that between your lips. If, on the other hand, you use costly tobacco, let me say, I do not think you can afford it. Take that which you expend and will expend, if you keep the habit all your life, and put it aside, and it will buy you a farm to make you comfortable in the afternoon of life.

A merchant of New York gave this testimony:

In early life I smoked six cigars a day at six and a half cents each’97they averaged that. I thought to myself one day, ’91I’92ll just put aside all the money I am consuming in cigars, and all I would consume if I kept on in the habit, and I will see what it will come to by compound interest.’94 [And he gives this tremendous statistic:] Last July completed thirty-nine years since, by the grace of God, I was emancipated from the filthy habit, and the saving amounted to the enormous sum of twenty-nine thousand one hundred and two dollars and three cents by compound interest. We lived in the city, but the children, who had learned something of the enjoyment of country life from their annual visits to their grandparents, longed for a home among the green fields. I found a very pleasant place in the country for sale. The cigar money now came into requisition, and I found it amounted to a sufficient sum to purchase the place, and it is mine. Now, boys, you take your choice, smoking without a home, or a home without smoking.

Listen to that, young man, and take another thing into consideration, and that is, vast amounts of property are destroyed every year indirectly by this habit. An agent of an insurance company says: ’93One half our losses come from the spark of the pipe and the cigar.’94 One young man threw away his cigar in one of the cities, and with it he threw away three millions of dollars’92 worth of the property of others that blazed up from that spark. Harpers’92 splendid printing establishment years ago was destroyed by a plumber who having lighted his pipe threw the match away, and it fell into a pot of camphene. The whole building was in flames. Five blocks went down. Two thousand employees thrown out of work, and more than a million dollars of property destroyed. But I am speaking of higher values today. Better destroy a whole city of stores than destroy one man.

My young friends, if you will excuse the idiom, I will say, stop before you begin. Here is a serfdom which has a shackle that it is almost impossible to break. Gigantic intellects that could overcome every other bad habit have been flung of this and kept down. Some one was seeking to persuade a man from the habit. The reply was, ’93Ask me to do anything under the canopy of heaven but this. This I cannot give up, and won’92t give up, though it take seven years off my life.’94

I must have a word also with all those of my friends whom it does not hurt, who can stop any time they want to, and who can smoke most expensive cigars. My Christian brother, what is your influence in the matter? How much can you afford to deny yourself for the good of others? It was a great mystery to many people why Governor Briggs, of Massachusetts, wore a cravat, but no collar. Some people thought it was an absurd eccentricity. Ah no! This was the secret. Many years before, he was talking with an inebriate and telling him that his habit was unnecessary, and the inebriate retorted, and said: ’93We do a great many things that are not necessary. It is not necessary for you to wear that collar.’94 ’93Well,’94 said Governor Briggs, ’93I never will wear a collar again if you won’92t drink.’94 ’93Agreed,’94 said the inebriate. Governor Briggs never wore a collar. They both kept their bargain for twenty years. They kept it to the death. That is the reason Governor Briggs did not wear a collar. That is the Gospel of the Son of God; self-denial for the good and the rescue of others.

So we might by little effort now and then save a man. By how little or by how much self-denial are we willing to be influenced? I stop at this point, because I have no more time to pursue the subject, although I have much more to say upon it. I stop at this point, by throwing all the passions of my soul into one prayer: God help us!

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage