the reader to the details which follow of a violent but successful
struggle with the most inveterate of all habits, is to be found in the
hope which the writer indulges, that while contributing something to
the current amount of knowledge as to the horrors attending the
habitual use of opium, the story may not fail to encourage some who
now regard themselves as hopeless victims of its power to a strenuous
and even desperate effort for recovery. Possibly the narrative may
also not be without use to those who are now merely in danger of
becoming enslaved by opium, but who may be wise enough to profit in
time by the experience of another.

A man who has eaten much more than half a hundredweight of opium,
equivalent to more than a hogshead of laudanum, who has taken enough
of this poison to destroy many thousand human lives, and whose
uninterrupted use of it continued for nearly fifteen years, ought to
be able to say something as to the good and the evil there is in the
habit. It forms, however, no part of my purpose to do this, nor to
enter into any detailed statement of the circumstances under which the
habit was formed. I neither wish to diminish my own sense of the evil
of such want of firmness as characterizes all who allow themselves to
be betrayed into the use of a drug which possesses such power of
tyrannizing over the most resolute will, nor to withdraw the attention
of the reader from the direct lesson this record is designed to convey,
by saying any thing that shall seem to challenge his sympathy or
forestall his censures. It may, however, be of service to other
opium-eaters for me to State briefly, that while endowed in most
respects with uncommon vigor of any tendency to despondency or
hypochondria, an unusual nervous sensibilitv, together with a
constitutional tendency to a disordered condition of the digestive
organs, strongly predisposed me to accept the fascination of the opium