FRENCH OPIUM SMOKERS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXIV, Issue 8082, 24 September 1887, Page 2 (Supplement)

FRENCH OPIUM SMOKERS.

There is at; present in the Hospital of the Charity a young non-commissioned officer, as he would be called in England, who is undergoing treatment as a victim to opium smoking. The soldier, who is a man of education, has given a remarkable account of his experiences as an opium smoker. He says that while in Tonkin or Cochin China one of the French generals caused an order to be issued against the use of the drug, and this very prohibition was the means of making several men try opium smoking through curiosity. The non-commissioned officer went with some comrades to the smoking saloon of a village. There a woman came to him and filled a long pipe with a small ball of what appeared to be a thick brown syrup, made as consistent as wax. This the soldier was pressed to take, and, placing its bowl over a lamp which was alight, he inhaled what seemed to be the fumes of sugar and burnt apples. He was at tirst rendered ill, but after a second pipe was plunged luto the ecstatic dreams described by De Quincey, Baudelaire, and M. Paul Bonnotam. He seemed to float into a bath of lukewarm milk, and memories that had long lain buried passed clearly through his imagination. He recollected forgotton melodies, snatches of songs, and extracts from favourite authors ; but when he awoke from the reverie he was perspiring with pain and fear. After this he kept up the habit for six months, smoking thirty grammes of opium on the day of his departure for France. The man at present looks rather livid, and his general appearance is that of a person who had been paralysed. It is expected, however, that he will be brought round by the treatment of the hospital physicians. M. Anatole France, who has asked the man for a statement of his experiences, says that at the present moment there is an opium saloon in Montmartre. It i 3 chiefly frequented by young artists and sculptors, and he himself was alio wed by special permission to enter a private room, where he saw stretched on a divan, lank ami livid, one of the best-known sculptors in Paris, who was slowly poisoning himself with opium owing to the death of his wife, whose vision he was able to conjure up amid the fumes of the deleterious drug.—Daily Telegraph,