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New Zealand Tablet, Volume X, Issue 514, 16 February 1883, Page 13

The growth* of the opiam and morphine habit is, according to several druggists, about as rapid and as full of evil portent as the more familiar sort of intemperance. One North- County apothecary says that in his section it has increased fully 25 per cent within four.^ or five years. He mentions one man who buys for a woman under his charge about 30dols. worth every two weeks of liquor, , morphine, laudanum and chloral, all of which she takes. The number who are indulging in hypodermic injections in some of the Berkshire towns is startlingly on the iucrease, and many of the victims are among the younger men. One young man m Pittsfield has been warned not to attempt to discontinue the practice, as it .would hasten his death. A young woman in Southern Berkshire, highly educated, accomplished in all respects and possessed of quite a fortune in her own right, has become so addicted to the use of morphine hypodermically that she often has to use it even in the night. Opium-smoking, some physicians and druggists say, is also beginning to be practiced, andin one case the sufferer is a young man who became so interested in tbe narrative of a man who had spent some time in China that he tried the experiment himself and has become confirmed in the habit. One of the old physicians of Berkshire says that he finds the influence of opiates of one kind and another showing itself in a great many oases in his practice. — Sprvtigfield (Mass) Republican,