The alcoholic controversy.

Date:
[1868?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The alcoholic controversy. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    former and the passions of the latter, has always been a high mis¬ demeanour, severely punishable. There is at least some limit to the evil which the animal passions of one man may work ; but there is no limit to the operations of avarice, which is incessant, eternal, and grows with its own successes. And the enormous resources which great firms of capitalists wield, enable them, by various agencies, to de¬ ceive, and allure to ruin, many thousands of inexperienced or weak victims. There is some difference of opi¬ nion, what is the natural tendency of men towards opium, spirits, and other narcotics. Many have said that we are universally and natu¬ rally prone to like such things, so that it is always a self-denial and a sort of asceticism to resist it. Others, on the very contrary, maintain that all these articles are naturally disa¬ greeable to us ; that we at first reject them, and are brought to like them only by artifice and custom. Be¬ tween these contrasted beliefs stand persons who say that some children naturally like, others naturally dis¬ like them; also, those who maintain, that the taste of the child is to reject, and of the adult to desire them. But in the midst of this difference there is complete and absolute agree¬ ment, that either all, or nearly all, persons of both sexes may be trained not only to like intoxicating drugs, but to be dependent on them, to count them as necessaries of life, to covet them more than food; in short, to lose all power of resisting their temptation. It is hardly too much to say, that every child born into the world might be trained to like opium, or absinthe, or proof spirit, by clever tempering and sweet¬ ening. When a delicious flavour of noyau, orange-flower, or other fruit is added to a liqueur, what young lady does not soon think it exquisite, though at first she com¬ plain that the spirit burns her P Notoriously, by the frequent use of such liqueurs the palate becomes deadened, the love of the sweet and fragrant declines, the craving for the scalding sensation increases. Utterly nasty as is wormwood, the taste for spirituous absinthe has become frightfully common in Paris. Opium drunkenness is almost unknown to us in England. We may hear it rumoured of this or that individual, alive or dead; but it does not ob¬ trude itself, we are not accustomed to it. We shudder at the reports, though Sir John Bowring says it is not so bad as spirit drinking. But because no 4 vested interest’ in opium chewing or laudanum sipping is yet established here, they will help us to take a fresher moral view of trade in narcotics. Let us suppose some enterprising confectioner to com¬ pound new sweetmeats and new drinks, peculiarly delicious, but with a very slight twang of opium, not enough to overpower the nicer fla¬ vours, but just enough to give a character to the stuff. He might then warn all customers to ask par¬ ticularly for A.K.X.’s Honey Hrops, and by the arts of advertisement might give great currency to his mixtures, with no small benefit to his purse. But when it was per¬ ceived that a taste for opium was thus little by little imbibed una¬ wares, what should we think of his trade ? Should we admit the excuse, that opium in quantities so small does no harm ? No : for the ques¬ tion would vehemently press: Is society to allow itself to be stealthily inoculated with the taste for this drug, for no better reason, than that a trader wants to enrich himself by it P The taste, once imbibed, may be like infection by a pestilence. The argument that a man has a 4 na¬ tural right ’ to sell what he pleases would not be listened to for a mo¬ ment. If for any reason the sale of opium was needfnl, we should say, 4 Let it be confined to the chemist; or let it be otherwise put under