ON THE HABITUAL USE OE 0PJUM 
58 
in a flight, with all these symptoms and many more, would a man in 
his senses deny the misery of that man’s life, or would it require a 
second Daniel to prophesy that the sun of his existence would pre¬ 
maturely be set. 
Within an hour I could produce a thousand of such creatures, and 
if I stood at the door of an Opium shop and watched those that en¬ 
tered, out of the 100 would be found at last 75 or 80 whose appear¬ 
ance would not require the confession that their health was destroy¬ 
ed, and their mind weakened, since the day that they were cursed 
with the first taste of an Opium pipe* To finish this subject let me 
record my opinion, the result of extensive investigation, that the ha- 
hiiual tise of Opium , not only renders the life of the man miser a- 
hie , hut is a powerful means of shortening that life. 
As a medical man in the course of these investigations I could not 
hut he struck with a series of facts which I found so frequent and 
30 marked as to compel me to draw this inference that the long con¬ 
tinued use of Opium leads to impotence in the male , and sterility 
in the female. Some writers in treating this subject mention that 
among narcotics Opium leads to anaplirodisiasm, but they lay hut 
little stress on it, giving tobacco the first place in the class of medi¬ 
cines producing such an effect. If such was the case we would have 
in tobacco a preventive check to an increasing population much more 
effective and universal than any which Miss Martineau has suggested. 
But tobacco has not the extent of pow r er which opium has. My friend 
G. H. Smith, Esq., Surgeon at Pinang, in an admirable treatise on 
“ Opium smoking in Pinang” published some years ago, and which I 
am sorry I have only been able to peruse an abstract of, calls the at¬ 
tention of those interested in the subject to this fact. He says, ££ it is 
however admitted by all that Opium smokers become impotent at a 
much earlier period than others” and even when children are horn to 
them, they are he says ec weak, stunted and decrepid ” During the 
course of my investigations I found that the continued use of Opium 
diminished the venereal appetite in both sexes, one female only who 
had consumed the drug for 10 years said she still retained her youth¬ 
ful passions, in some men the desire remains, but the power of ful- 
