[Author’s note: The following account of American opium dens was originally written to warn people of the danger of opium. The reporter, writing from prison, is identified only as No. 6606. His story, “A Modern Opium Eater,” was published in the June 1914 issue of The American Magazine.]
Five years ago I was editor and manager of a metropolitan daily newspaper. To-day I am a convict serving my second penitentiary sentence – a “two-time loser” in the language of the underworld, my world now. Between these extremes is a single cause - opium.
For five years I have been a smoker of opium. For five years there has not been a day, scarcely an hour, during which my mind and body have not been under the influence of the most subtle and insidious of drugs.
Few people in the United States realize the extent to which opium and kindred drugs are being used to-day in this country. You, my reader, may have read of the Federal Government’s strict prohibitive law against the importation of smoking opium, and concurred idly and without interest. But do you know that the United States Revenue Service has a roster of over three thousand known users of opium in San Francisco alone? Countless other thousands are unregistered. Every other great city in the country has similar rosters, and numbers its “fiends” by thousands and tens of thousands. Hundreds of cans of the contraband drug are sold daily in New York, Chicago, Denver, New Orleans, Salt Lake, and Portland. The United States army posts have been invaded, and thousands of the wearers of our country’s uniform are users of opium, morphine, and cocaine. The severest penalties have not seemed even to check the habit.
Starting at the Presidio in San Francisco with transports returning from the Orient, the drug habit has spread among the enlisted men in the army by leaps and bounds. The reason is easily found. Not one man in a hundred, once he has tested the peace, the mind-ease, the soothed nerves and the surcease from all sorrows, disappointments, and responsibilities that come from a first use of opium, ever again has the will-power to deny himself that delightful nepenthe. Opium is like the salary loan shark – a friend to-day, smoothing difficulty and trouble with a free and easy hand. To-morrow it becomes a master, exacting a toll a hundredfold more terrible than the ills it eased.
Source:
Stephens, John Richard. “Participants in History.” Weird History 101: Tales of Intrigue, Mayhem, and Outrageous Behavior. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2006. 224-25. Print.
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