In 1837, a magazine introducing China published in Guangzhou and Macau published an illustrated article by a Chinese artist. This article vividly described how the son of a wealthy merchant who smoked opium suffered from health problems. , the process from wealth to pain and poverty, the pictures are as follows:
1. A young man at home, dressed luxuriously, in good health, and full of youthful vitality. There is an exquisite foreign clock placed on the marble table behind. On his right is a jewelry box filled with gold and silver treasures. His personal servant is standing next to it. A little further away, another of his servants has bought medicine and is bringing it in.
2. He was lying on a luxurious sofa with a pipe in his mouth, surrounded by prostitutes, two of whom were young and beautiful. He spends a lot of money.
3. He was addicted to drugs and greedy. Not long after he indulged in this kind of life, his face became as pale as a vegetable, his appearance was withered, and he was extremely thin. His shoulders were high, his teeth were bared, his face was ashen, and he felt groggy all day long. , completely devoid of vitality. Even in this situation, he was still sitting on a very ordinary couch, smoking a pipe in his mouth, and there were other smoking paraphernalia beside him. At this time, his wives, a wife and a concubine, came over. The wife found that the jewelry box was empty, and she stood there frowning in surprise; the concubine stared at the things piled on the couch with confusion. Smoking stuff.
4. His property and house were all reduced to nothing, and his couch was replaced with some rough boards and tattered cushions. He was barefoot, face turned sideways, head tilted forward, panting. Rough. His wife and children stood before him, dressed in rags and starving. One son angrily threw all his smoking utensils to the ground. The younger son, who was inexperienced in the world, clapped his little hands and laughed and played games, but he was indifferent to all this.
5. His addiction to cigarettes is getting worse and worse, but now his life is as poor and desperate as rotten wood. Even in this situation, he still scraped together a few coins and hurried to I went to a smoking shop and bought some cigarette crumbs from another smoker's pipe to alleviate his unbearable craving.
6. His role is fixed, that of a smoker. He was sitting on the bamboo chair, still swallowing the medicine. It was so dirty that he had to use tea to swallow the medicine. His wife and children sat on the edge, straightening bundles of silk on bamboo rolls, and then winding them into balls. They worked hard to earn a meager income to survive. They lived hard.
This is a portrait of a typical opium addict. If I were to add another scene, I think it would be the wife and children being separated, and finally the hateful smoker lying dead on the street, being eaten by wild dogs.
When it comes to opium, the first thing that Chinese people think of is the humiliation suffered in modern times. It often brings back painful memories for Chinese people. Many people even think that opium is the source of China’s modern sufferings. This understanding is generally correct, but if our understanding of opium stops at this, it will not be enough.
Opium is a drug, no one knows it now. However, over the past thousands of years, opium has mostly been regarded as a miraculous medicine or even a sacred object. Moreover, the history of opium being discovered and used in the West is much longer than that in China, and its impact is much greater. Existing research results have proven that Europe is the hometown of opium poppy, and the earliest artificially cultivated opium poppy also appeared in Europe. As early as the Neolithic Age 6,000 years ago, well-preserved remains of wild and cultivated poppy seeds and fruits have been found in many places in Europe. However, the purpose of poppy cultivation at that time is not very clear to people today. It may have been used as an analgesic or to extract oil, or it may have been used in religious ceremonies. The plant then spread to Mesopotamia's Mesopotamia, and the Sumerians may have discovered the true secret of the poppy, because they called it "the plant that makes people happy." As late as 3,000 years ago, knowledge of opium had spread throughout Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. The earliest and more reliable records of the discovery of opium come from Egypt, because opium samples were found in tombs about 3,500 years ago. The Egyptian city of Thebes is famous for its production of opium. Thebaine, an important ingredient in opium, is also named after the city. In Egypt, opium was used to treat abscesses, relieve headaches, treat wounds, and calm noisy children. There is such a prescription in the ancient Egyptian papyrus: "Mix the poppy pulp with the fly droppings on the wall and filter it. Take it for four days and the effect will be visible." This method has been adopted by people all over the world. . Historical records show that until modern times in Europe, mothers or nannies still gave opium to restless babies. British textile workers worked very hard during the day and many mothers did the same in order to get adequate rest at night. In addition, opium also has the function of suppressing appetite. Children from poor families can reduce their hunger and save food expenses after taking opium. As one observer put it, by the age of three or four, many children were in poor health due to malnutrition and were "shrunk like a little old man or as shrunken as a monkey." As you can imagine, most of these poor children continue to be poor when they grow up, and many become drug addicts. In modern China, opium had even more incredible effects. "Xiamen Chronicle" recorded that many wealthy families did not hesitate to use opium as bait to keep their children at home to smoke opium in order to prevent their children from going out to gamble or cause trouble.
Until the early 19th century, opium was not considered a drug.
Many European countries have previously issued anti-alcohol laws, but there have been no anti-opium laws. People still hold the concept that "opium is harmless." Some scholars even believe that the emergence of European romantic literature in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was closely related to opium. Without opium, some of the most outstanding works might not have been born. The core of romantic literature is the revival of imagination, which is the combination of imagination wings and narrative, which is reflected in more free and subjective expressions of passion, sadness and other personal emotions, rather than blind description, all of which need to make people temporarily To break away from the shackles of the secular world ideologically, writers need the stimulation of opium. Romantic writers of this period such as Goethe, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Scott, Shelley, Byron, De Quincey, etc. The creation of their related works may be related to opium to some extent. Some writers Also suffered from opiate addiction. In fact, this is the case. Many writers created their most famous and best works after suffering from opium addiction. The brave De Quincey published the autobiographical novel "Confessions of an Opium Eater" in 1821. He claimed that the real protagonist in the novel was opium and not himself. He spent a lot of space in his works describing his wonderful feelings after taking opium, and wrote the famous "Ode to Opium":
Oh! Fair and powerful opium! You treat the poor and the rich equally. , you bring the alleviating balm to those wounds that can never be healed and the anguish that "tempts the spirit to rebel" - the opium of eloquence!... In the center of darkness, you use the imagination of the mind to build a city and temples... whose magnificence surpassed that of Babylon and Hekatompylos; and washed "from the confusion of sleep" the faces of long-buried beauties and dead family members. After "the disgrace of the tomb," they were all recalled into the light of day. Only you can give all these gifts to mankind. Only you hold the key to heaven.
The use of opium is by no means limited to the general population. Opium is also taken in large quantities by the military in many countries, with permission from the government. During the American Civil War, the armies of both sides were inseparable from opium, because in the harsh and harsh war environment, taking opium could effectively treat and prevent epidemic dysentery and diarrhea, and could also temporarily relieve the pain caused by homesickness or the loss of loved ones. . In the Union army, opium was rationed by the government and distributed regularly to soldiers. Among European armies, opium was probably the most popular item after alcohol.
Before the beginning of the 19th century, opium was not regarded as a scourge around the world. Opium, like alcohol and tobacco, was just a hobby of people. In addition, opium also had the function of curing diseases, so most people Opium is even considered to be a good thing for people. Even after scientists and doctors isolated other, purer substances from opium (which were actually more addictive substances), opium was still not considered a drug. The ingredients in opium are very complex. There are more than 20 known alkaloids, accounting for 25% of its total weight. The main ingredients are morphine (10%), codeine (0.5%), and thebaine (0.2 %), papaverine (1%), noslopin (6%), etc. Heroin is another alkaloid extracted from morphine by German scientists. Heroisch in German means "universal or heroic" because clinical experiments have proven that its efficacy (analgesia and sedation) is 5 to 10 times that of morphine. It can be seen that opium is the source of several major drugs. It is appropriate for people to call opium the "mother of drugs". However, before the international community officially recognized drugs, people used poison to fight poison, that is, morphine was used to treat opium addiction, because at that time it was believed that injecting morphine would not make people addicted (most people believed that opium is addictive because it is tasted through the mouth) and gastric digestion); when heroin first came on the market, it was also used as a specific drug to treat morphine addiction. It was not until after 1910 that the medical community had a clearer understanding of the dangers of heroin, and its medical use gradually decreased. However, by this time heroin had already caused irreversible effects around the world.