THE DEADLY DRUG.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume IX, Issue 31, 30 July 1892, Page 755

THE DEADLY DRUG.

Everybody seems to be starting up the morphine question again. And everybody else wonders what it feels like, who really takes it, and if the stories told are really true. Of course, a great many of them are not; unfortunately, a great many of them are. There are very few women who, at some time or other in their lives, have not suffered such agonizing pain that they have been forced to take morphine. In some instances this has been followed by a regular course of it, the trouble usually beginning when the patient learns or is permitted to learn by an ignorant doctor how to give herself a dose of it. From that time on, she will kill the least pain she has with a ‘ jab.’ We haven’t the best rules, by the bye, in regard to physicians, for a peifectly strange doctor will come in, and, if a woman is clever enough, will give her a hypodermic injection of morphine (I think I ought to say morphia), without knowing whether she has been forbidden it by her doctor, or whether her family are trying to cure her. The deadly horrors of sleeplessness, the raging pain, are at once subdued by the subtle drug, and rest and pleasant dreams come with it.

In New York, a woman whose picture has been in every newspaper in the country, and who married a man of title in England, was so given over to the use of morphine that every chair in her house in which she was in the habit of sitting had a needle and syringe concealed in the soft folds of the silk that draped it. A nurse watched her day and night, and yet both doctor and nurse knew that she got exactly what she wanted, for this marvellous medicine seems to give its victims a great facility for intrigue ; and to gain what they long for they will plot and lie as no healthy person would believe possible. In Paris the morphine habit has reached such a degree that a club of fasionable women has been formed, who meet, give themselves a hypodermic dose and then recount their experiences and sensations while under the effect of the drug.

The doctors in vain have tried to get the deadly needle from them. Not very long ago a well-known physician showed at a medical meeting just how a patient had deceived him and her own family. She always wore a beautiful gold chatelaine, upon which hnng her gold purse and all the little trinkets that women fancy on such an article. Among them was what looked like a good sized pencil, set with rubies and sapphires ; on another chain hung a gold smelling bottle, and on another a ring set around with rubies and sapphires. Now, in the pencil was the syringe and needle, in the bottle was the morphine, and the ling was intended to slip over the finger to keep it from pushing the syringe too far ! Of the woman from whom this was taken it was said that it was not known how she could ever give it to herself, as she was never left alone ; but the doctor constituting himself a private detective, discovered that she went to church a great deal, always wore her chatelaine to chuieli, and could very easily give herself a ‘ jab as she knelt, apparently bowed in prayer on the floor. Cunning? X es - H you will watch you will see how, in certain conditions, a woman and a monkey are exactly alike.