Does Anybody Argue That Drug Use Isn't Bad For You

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kcdodd
Posts: 722
Joined: Tue Jun 03, 2008 3:36 am
Location: Austin, TX

Post by kcdodd »

MSimon wrote:
Show us a single study that isolates cancer caused by Cannabis, from cancer caused by tobacco.
That is an interesting question. No study has done that it is true. But there are studies.

...
Thank you MSimon, you were more thorough than I would bother to be. However, if it is true that the carcinogenic effect of marijuana is minimal, how can you have a study showing it is not? The point is until you can show it is doing the harm, how can you say it is? The way GIT is phrasing the question precipitates the answer he wants. I smell lots of cognitive dissonance.

To my original question, I think the answer is close to zero. With the exception due to car accidents. But then again, cell phones are probably as dangerous in that regard.
Last edited by kcdodd on Mon Jan 14, 2013 10:50 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Carter

williatw
Posts: 1912
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Location: Ohio

Post by williatw »

GIThruster wrote:
williatw wrote:. . .I still don't get why you think anyone who thinks the war on drugs is a failure is a drug user.
I don't think that. I personally know several people who do not use drugs, including my twin brother, who mistakenly believe the war on drugs is a failure; because they don't understand the point behind a mitigating action or what our society would look like without the war on drugs.
I understand the idea just don't buy it. Again I am not a drug user (though you can believe what you want), don't smoke, haven't had anything in many years stronger than beer, or wine occasionally, just don't see throwing someone in jail for substance abuse as value added used of my tax dollars.

GIThruster
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Joined: Tue May 25, 2010 8:17 pm

Post by GIThruster »

Well we may not disagree. I have said plenty of times I think treatment is a better solution than incarceration. That is not however, the topic of this thread.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

GIThruster
Posts: 4686
Joined: Tue May 25, 2010 8:17 pm

Post by GIThruster »

kcdodd wrote:. . .if it is true that the carcinogenic effect of marijuana is minimal, how can you have a study showing it is not? The point is until you can show it is doing the harm, how can you say it is?
I was under the impression it had been shown conclusively that Cannabis has far more kinds and levels of carcinogens than does tobacco. That is however not the data you asked for. There is no way to determine what any particular natural occurrence of cancer originated from, so obviously there is no way to determine which cancers came from cannabis, and which from tobacco in the case of someone who uses both.

Just saying. . . .neither you nor simon have a clue how statistical analysis works or you wouldn't be making these claims nor asking these kinds of questions.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

kcdodd
Posts: 722
Joined: Tue Jun 03, 2008 3:36 am
Location: Austin, TX

Post by kcdodd »

You brought up cancer, not me. I asked how many people die due to marijuana per year. That is a single, absolute number. If you are saying that the effect of marijuana is so small it can't be measured, then I think I've made my point. But, if you think that one cannot determine such a statistic as that, even hypothetically, how can you possibly make any argument about the less quantifiable effects, such as psychological impact? You basically admit to simply blowing hot air at that point.
Carter

GIThruster
Posts: 4686
Joined: Tue May 25, 2010 8:17 pm

Post by GIThruster »

You're being obtuse again. I have already given you several examples of how you cannot have a sensible answer to your question. You're ignoring the obvious and pretending you have an answer when you don't. To be more blunt--your question is conceptually confused because there is no proper answer for it. You have not explained what you mean by "direct" nor why any answer you could give there would be meaningful. You are confused.

All data requires specific qualifications, stipulations and context to be meaningful. There is not only no way to answer your question, but if you accepted a shabby pseudo-answer like what simon wants to pretend is a decent response to your question, you would then still have data that does not come to the issue.

For instance, amongst all what you might like to term "indirect" causes of death, are probably what. . .all the accidental deaths caused by mistakes people made while high. How are those not "direct" according to your definition? And why are you precising the way you must be without telling anyone what you're precising?

You're just being silly and obtuse.

Again, what about all the people who die from Xstacy, cocaine, heroin and Meth that only got started in the drug scene because they thought Cannabis was harmless? Those people died because of Cannabis.

You're ignoring all the real numbers because you think you have some natural division between "direct" and "indirect" but you don't. What do you mean by "direct"? You've yet to answer the question. With all the things you say its not, it seems direct death by cannabis only includes people who are impaled through the heart by the plant during a fantastic wind-storm and even then you'll want to call that death indirect because it was really caused by the wind.

All these kinds of death--accidents caused from someone being high, cancer caused by carcinogens in the plant, deaths from other drugs made possible by the gateway function of Cannabis, murders for the sake of a high or as result of a high--they are all deaths caused by Cannabis.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

ladajo
Posts: 6258
Joined: Thu Sep 17, 2009 11:18 pm
Location: North East Coast

Post by ladajo »

kcdodd wrote:
MSimon wrote:
Show us a single study that isolates cancer caused by Cannabis, from cancer caused by tobacco.
That is an interesting question. No study has done that it is true. But there are studies.

...
Thank you MSimon, you were more thorough than I would bother to be. However, if it is true that the carcinogenic effect of marijuana is minimal, how can you have a study showing it is not? The point is until you can show it is doing the harm, how can you say it is? The way GIT is phrasing the question precipitates the answer he wants. I smell lots of cognitive dissonance.

To my original question, I think the answer is close to zero. With the exception due to car accidents. But then again, cell phones are probably as dangerous in that regard.
POSITION PAPER
Respiratory health effects of cannabis: Position Statement of The Thoracic Society of Australia and New Zealand (2003)
http://www.socalpar.es/rev_biblio_docum ... nnabis.pdf
All the available evidence suggests that the risks of regular cannabis smoking are similar to those of regular tobacco smoking. Similarities between the combustion products of cannabis and tobacco, as well as their acute and subacute pathological effects in regular smokers,
make this biologically plausible. The fact that the longterm sequelae of cannabis smoking have not been clearly documented is largely due to the decline in cannabis use that has hitherto occurred during early adult life,
possibly as a result of its illegal status in most countries.
This pattern may change if its legal status changes.
Here is another general overview of pot use and effects thereof.
You may like this one better as it does try to take a balanced view. Note however that since it was written ( November, 1998), more studies showing longer term impacts have been done, which reinforce the negative findings and potentials.

Adverse effects of cannabis (Nov, 1998)
http://www.ukcia.org/research/AdverseEf ... nnabis.pdf
Uncertainty about the adverse health effects of acute, and especially chronic, cannabis use, should not prevent medical practitioners from advising patients who use cannabis about the most probable ill-effects of their cannabis use with emphasis on the uncertainty.
In the absence of other risk factors, this should include advice about
the possibility of being involved in a motor-vehicle accident if patients drive while intoxicated by cannabis;
the higher risk of an accident if they drive when intoxicated by both alcohol and cannabis;
the respiratory risks of long-term cannabis smoking, which are substantially increased if they also smoke tobacco;
an increased risk of developing dependence if they are daily users of cannabis;
and the possibility of subtle cognitive impairment if they use regularly over several years.

And specifically to your question...

"Cannabis use and risk of lung cancer: a case–control study" (Feb, 2008)
http://www.ersj.org.uk/content/31/2/280.full
The risk of lung cancer increased 8%
the results of the present study indicate that long-term cannabis use increases the risk of lung cancer in young adults.
Illegal drugs are not safe to use, they incur risk. Most importantly, personal use incurs involuntary risk and burdens on others.
The development of atomic power, though it could confer unimaginable blessings on mankind, is something that is dreaded by the owners of coal mines and oil wells. (Hazlitt)
What I want to do is to look up C. . . . I call him the Forgotten Man. (Sumner)

choff
Posts: 2447
Joined: Thu Nov 08, 2007 5:02 am
Location: Vancouver, Canada

Post by choff »

The other day I saw a young person wearing a T shirt that said, "I used to care, now I take a pill." Read an article called, "What psychopaths can teach us." Saw another article that said a control group of psychopaths behaved in a more socially responsible way than day traders doing the same task.

Maybe the reason society has so many problems is because our idea of normal behavior is being shifted toward the antisocial via medication.
CHoff

Diogenes
Posts: 6968
Joined: Mon Jun 15, 2009 3:33 pm

Post by Diogenes »

Image



New York October 1907

1 THE DRAMA OF A DRUG


Great Britain, China, and the Opium Curse. The Fight to a Finish between 400,000,000 Human Souls and a Drug

By Samuel Merwin Volume x N umber 161

A dinner at the Astor House Shanghai is almost as imposing and almost as unsatisfactory as Shanghai itself The dining hall is long and lofty the near French of the menu is quite ornate enough for the Hoffman House or the Waldorf Astoria and on Wednesday evenings there is an orchestra but it is difficult to forget that the preserved butter came in a tin from Australia the want of real milk makes an unexpected difference in the taste of the cooked dishes and the fresh vegetables are not alluring to one who has looked into Chinese agricultural methods.

Shanghai I later heard a Peking attache say is full of information about China and it is all wrong I had about come to this conclusion for myself on an evening when I leaned on my third story window sill and gazed out into the night in the general direction of the American post office There seemed little hope of sleep with that near French dinner still in mind and with a few dozen jackies from some Christian fleet or other raising a complicated kind of Cain in the German beer hall across the street.

I had come to this far away Shanghai via the snows of Western Canada and the sleet of the North Pacific in the hope of getting at the facts of the saddest the most tremendous drama in the world -the drama of England China and the opium curse- only to find that Shanghai was not interested in the opium curse or in China. Shanghai was interested in the spring race meeting and the price of money I was later to learn about Shanghai for one thing that it is not China for another that it is itself the scene of an opium drama in which the Christian foreigner plays a part rather bewildering to those of us who like to think that the Christian consciousness is more than skin deep in us westerners.

Robert E Lewis the general secretary of the Shanghai YMCA says that there are more than 19,000 places in the International Settlement in which a man (or a woman or a child) can smoke opium The figure is so high that it staggered even the gentlemen of the anti opium society in London when I quoted it to them and these gentlemen have been confronted with some staggering figures in their time. The International Settlement is ruled by Englishmen Germans and Americans and it shelters 450,000 Chinese It licenses the opium dens and it has a neat way of getting around its own laws prohibiting women inmates. There is a miserably sordid story to tell of the regulation of vice in Shanghai a story which has a familiar ring to one who knows the ways of the New York or Chicago police but the really new and interesting light on the Shanghai situation is that this sort of thing went serenely on last spring in the Settlement after the Chinese rulers of the native city had closed all the opium dens there. But this story along with that of the benign influence of the foreigner at Tientsin and at Hongkong will have to come in a later article I cannot stop for it here.

The few dozen Christian sailors were still rioting cheerfully in the German beer hall The unflagging smell of the East floated to my nostrils I had come to get at China and I had not yet got at Shanghai I had merely talked with thirty odd experts on China (some were even sinologues) and had made the interesting discovery that thirty odd experts can voice thirty odd wholly contradictory sets of opinions and conclusions I found myself wondering if ever reporter had set out on so bewildering an assignment before. Somewhere thereabouts was China -vast complex hiding complicated Oriental thoughts behind inscrutable yellow faces, four hundred million inscrutable yellow faces -China with her eighteen provinces, her more than eighteen languages, her age old philosophy struggling to throw off a soul wrecking curse which the Christian white man had fastened upon her along with gunboats the Bible and whisky Yes there was China And here was I, a humble individual trying in my third story room at the Astor House

SUCCESS MAGAZINE


Link.
Last edited by Diogenes on Thu Jan 17, 2013 9:00 pm, edited 4 times in total.
‘What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’
— Lord Melbourne —

Diogenes
Posts: 6968
Joined: Mon Jun 15, 2009 3:33 pm

Post by Diogenes »

Image


... to digest a rather bewildering near French dinner trying it seemed to digest a labyrinth containing eighteen provinces and more than eighteen languages and some four hundred millions of inscrutable yellow faces.

But the wonderful opium drama was there Through the tangle of misinformation I was drifting steadily toward it Every day some sinister hint threw a fresh half light on some outlying phase of this immense conflict between a third of the human race and the black craving which may yet sap their souls away 1 walked back into the room switched on the electric light and slowly turned the pages of my notebook.

Was the situation really so bad They did n t seem to think so at Shanghai I spread out on the table a translation of the imperial edict of September 1906 the one which proposes with a naivete that even then struck me as grim that this huge sodden race menaced morally physically and economically by the white man's smoke simply stop using it.


Condemned by Imperial Edict



The cultivation of the poppy says the translation is the greatest iniquity in agriculture and the provinces of Szechuen Shensi Kansu Yunnan Kweichow Shansi and Kang huai abound in this product which in fact is found everywhere Now that it is decided to abandon opium smoking within ten years my italics the limiting of this cultivation should be taken as a fundamental step opium has been in use so long by the people that nearly three tenths to four tenths of them are smokers.

Three tenths to four tenths the estimate seemed rather wild From one hundred to one hundred and fifty million opium smokers in China means three or four times the population of Great Britain a good many more than the population of the United States After all I thought statistics are meaningless to the Oriental mind But my eye fell on certain quotations already familiar in my notebook Surely the trained British investigators official some of them could be reliedon to get it fairly straight I read this from Mr Hosie the commercial attache to the British legation at Peking an experienced traveler and observer He is reporting on conditions in Szechuen Province.


I am well within the mark when I say that in the cities fifty per cent of the males and twenty per cent of the females smoke opium and that in the country the percentage is not less than twenty five for men and five per cent for women. There are about forty two million people in Szechuen Province and they not only raise and consume an appalling quantity of opium they also send about twenty thousand tons down the Yang tse River every year for use in other provinces I was later to hear from other ob servers that about all of the richest soil in Szechuen is given over to poppy cultivation and that the laboring classes show a noticeable decline of late in physique and capacity for work And this from Colonel Manifold of the British Indian Medical Service about Yunnan I saw practically the whole population given over to its abuse The ravages it is making in men women and children are deplorable I was quite able to realize that any one who had seen the wild abuse of opium in Yunnan would have a wild abhorrence of it.

Victims in All Classes

I recalled certain odds and ends of the jumble of information I had already picked up at first hand The secretary of a life insurance company which does a considerable business up and down the coast had told me that roughly fifty per cent of the Chinese who apply for insurance are opium smokers Another scrap of information came from a man who had lived for several years in an inland city of a quarter of a million inhabitants The local Anti opium League had 750 members he said and he believed that about every other man in the city was a smoker It is practically a case of everybody smoking he said.


Still turning the pages my eye singled out another typical memorandum Twenty five years ago when the consumption of opium in China could hardly have been more than half what it is to day a British consul estimated the proportion of smokers in the regions he had visited as follows laborers and small farmers ten per cent small shopkeepers twenty per cent soldiers thirty per cent merchants eighty per cent officials and their staffs ninety per cent actors prostitutes vagrants thieves ninety five per cent The laborers and farmers the real strength of China as of every other race had not yet been overwhelmed but they were going under even then The most appalling news to day is from these lower classes even from the country villages the last to give way Already Dr Parker the American Methodist missionary at Shanghai had told me that reports to this effect were coming in steadily from up country later on 1 was to hear the same bad news almost everywhere along a route which had measured before I left China between three and four thousand miles.


An Herculean Task


This then was the curse which the Imperial Government talked so quaintly of abandoning This was the debauchery which was to be put down by officials ninety per cent of whom were supposed to be more or less confirmed smokers I could not help thinking of a certain Sunday in New York when Theodore Roosevelt with the whole police force under his orders tried to close the saloons I thought of other attempts in Europe and America to check and control vice and depravity attempts which have never I think been wholly successful and I began to understand in a groping sort of way the discouraging immensity of the task which China has undertaken Really to stop using opium would mean a vast rearrangement of the agricultural plan of the empire It would make necessary an immediate solution of China's transportation problem no other crop is so easy to carry as opium and an almost complete reconstruction of the imperial finances indeed few observers are so glib as to suggest offhand a substitute for the immense opium revenue to the Chinese Government And nobody to accomplish all this but those sodden officials of whom it is safe to guess that fifty per cent have some sort or other of a financial stake in the traffic.

Off to the Interior

But the fight was on And I had come out here to tell something at first hand about the greatest moral struggle perhaps that this world has seen The drama was there this drama of a drug and it might yet GAUNT SEAMED AND HOPELESS Photograph snapped from n movina mule litter AN OPIUM RECEIVING SHIP OR GODOWN AT SHANGHAI The importrtl Indian opium is stored in these ships until it passes the Chinese imperial customs.


646 SUCCESS MAGAZINE
‘What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’
— Lord Melbourne —

Diogenes
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Joined: Mon Jun 15, 2009 3:33 pm

Post by Diogenes »

Image



...become a colossal tragedy. This possibility was to be constantly present to me later on as I rode in my springless cart or my swaying mule litter along the stricken countrysides and through the gray ruined villages of the northwestern interior But it is a possibility before which imagination balks The mind can compass only little tragedies This drama was so big so complicated that I had not yet been able to see it at all Could I hope to see it?

The sailors from a Christian fleet were very drunk now A party of them sallied out into the street good humoredly upset a rickshaw or two and marched away in a wobbly column of fours singing I ma Yankee Doodle Dandy Apparently the songs of George M Cohan have followed the flag A sharp little breeze came whistling over the housetops from somewhere out Woosung way The street noises were dying down A church clock struck twelve No this was not China And I found myself smiling as I closed the window Just one thing was clear I must get out of Shanghai and find China So at ten o clock of a Tuesday evening freshly vaccinated after telling a hold up man who was masquerading as a cab driver exactly what I kthought of him I boarded the Yangtse River steamer Kiang Hsin and went to sleep in a commodious stateroom.


There are two ways of getting to Peking from Shanghai The more direct is by coasting steamer to Tientsin a matter of only four or five days if you are lucky enough to scrape over the Taku bar without sticking for an extra day or two The other way is to go up the Yangtse 600 miles to Hankow and from there to take the new railroad up through the middle of the Great Plain to Peking There is an express every Saturday from Hankow with dining and sleeping car service which covers the 800 miles in thirty six hours.

The Yarns of the Pilot


There were long nights on the Kiang Hsin when the English traveler the naval surgeon the chief engineer and I sat about the dining table in the saloon and listened to the yarns of an Upper Yangtse pilot They were good yarns in their way but they had to do with the motor car market at Shanghai with the shortcomings of the Shanghai volunteer corps and with the famous and rather lively row at the Shanghai council meeting last March There was to be sure a whiff of China in the talk of an engineer from the Nanking railroad construction work He was a pale spectacled young Englishman who sat quietly at the table and told casual and horrible tales of death and disaster in the famine district north of Chin kiang But he did not really warm up until the chance came to tell about the work on the Chinkiang tunnel He was rather proud of that tunnel.

At the ports Nanking Kiukiang Wuhu Hankow China seemed no nearer If one hilltop bore a nine story pagoda the next was hidden...

(THE VILLAGES WERE LITTLE MORE THAN HEAPS OF RUINS From a photograph by Mr Merwin showing holes in the ground occupied by formerly well to do opium smokers who sold the roof tiles woodwork and birch of their houses in order to buy opium)



... under a big mission compound with European buildings and stone walls The most conspicuous part of the river front was pretty sure to be occupied by a row of foreign warehouses and residences fronting on a paved boulevard Flags of all nations waved serenely English German French and American gunboats steamed up and down the river among the passenger boats and merchantmen or lay at anchor And that night when the Peking express rolled out of the Hankow station I was still looking for China It would surely turn up at Peking at Peking the dusty the odorous the swarming the many colored the riotously Oriental in pattern at Peking with its Manchus its Mongols its mysterious closed carts and its endless strings of moth eaten camels its flaming banners and wailing trumpets its embroidered coats its mandarins with buttons and peacock feathers its gayly clad legation guards and its cynical diplomats This illusion was still about me like a cloud on that Monday morning when my rickshaw propelled by two tattered coolies whirled through the demilune and the main archway of the great Chien Men Gate dashed along Legation Street past the walled and guarded compounds crossed the canal bridge with a rumble and a shout and wheeled up triumphant in its own little whirlwind of gray dust before the dusty red bricks and the dusty green courtyard of the Grand Hotel des Wagon lits.


The Chestnuts in the Pan

China is an immense and at times rather warm pan of chestnuts with a thin line of hard drinking loud talking German American and English traders around the rim not to mention the French and Portuguese and Japanese who are there for the highly profitable business of getting the chestnuts out Usually this business is easy but sometimes as when the perplexed Chinaman's sullen submission turns to anger against those exacting white devils and all their gunboats and missionaries and opium and forcibly held treaty ports it presents difficulties The cynical diplomats at Peking who drop cards in one another's gate boxes at stated intervals and serve tea to lady travelers and go out when dignity relaxes a bit to see the moving pictures at the Arcade and generally furnish the gossip which keeps their secretaries from ennui are there for the purpose of extracting the chestnuts on those occasions when the pan is too warm for the downright hands of commerce It was partly to learn from the fine work of these cynical ones that I had come to Peking.


There exist magazine reporters who encourage the notion that journalism like diplomacy has its mysteries its subtleties its brilliant coups Perhaps it has When Vance Thompson sits in a Paris caji kings slip into the next chair and ask to borrow five dollars from him beautiful ladies in picture hats hide sealed packets in their bosoms and whisper mysterious instructions to cabmen kings messengers flit on the scene and off spies lurk in dark corners with knives beneath their coats It is probably because none of these things ever happens to me that I envy Vance Thompson I thought of him that first night at the Wagon lits.

Down to Plain Hard Work

Surely if Paris has its hidden secrets of diplomacy Peking with its bizarre Oriental dress and with chaotic kaleidoscopic China for a background should be a fairyland of mysteries But here as everywhere that I have been reporting proved to be rather plain hard work It sounded interesting at first to meet and talk with the cynical diplomats But before very long it transpired that they knew almost as little and cared fully as little about the opium curse as did those hard drinking ones for whose governments they were working They seemed to be absorbed in the fine work of oet ing the chestnuts out of the pan Royalty did not appear The more or less beautiful ladies who crossed
‘What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’
— Lord Melbourne —

Diogenes
Posts: 6968
Joined: Mon Jun 15, 2009 3:33 pm

Post by Diogenes »

Image


the the stage of my observations were mainly engaged in bargaining with wily peddlers The only man who might have been a spy was the Japanese barber and he did not lurk in dark corners but contented himself with selling me a very bad razor.

It was evident that I must look further There were missionaries scores of them who had much to say simple God fearing men who spoke the language and lived the life physicians some of them giving their lives to the rescue of the opium ictims There were teachers Chinese secretaries of legation journalists English speaking Chinese officials and merchants and sinologues sprinkled about but where in all this babel of tongues and this flutter of red tape was China Groping along in this spirit forming conclusions one day only to replace them with others the next morning I swallowed gulp by gulp my peck of Peking dust and wrestled with the deliciously absurd system of official etiquette which is the governing principle of Legation Street until it became plain that this ever receding China was still somewhere in the dusty jabbering beyond out there where the camel trains came from perhaps.

The Jumping Off Place

So I went over the rim by way of the Hankow line to Chen Tou pronounced Jun Toe and spelled on a French time table Che ke fiang and westward by way of the brand new Shansi railroad from Chen Tou through the Southern Great Wall and the Shansi hills to Shau Yang This was the jumping off place inside the rim The rest of it had to be done in springless country carts and swaying pitching mule litters crawling along by day in the sunken roads of which I had read in my school geography sleeping by night in unspeakably decrepit native inns It was dirty it was insanitary it was wholly uncomfortable but it was China and my mind cleared day by day Everywhere there was misery The road through the countryside was lined with the caves of beggars The villages in these hills of Shansi were little more than heaps of ruin The faces of young and old were gaunt seamed hopeless At last I was seeing the opium drama Some hint of the meaning of it a faint impression of the terrible devastation of the white man's drug let loose as it has been on a backward poverty stricken race was being seared hour by hour and day by day into my brain It was not pleasant this zigzag journey through an opium province but I had found the wonderful opium drama and I knew then that it would haunt me as long as I lived.

The Chinese Did not Want Opium


In the minds of most of us I think there has been a vague notion that the Chinese have always smoked opium that opium is in some peculiar way a necessity to the Chinese constitution Even among those who know the extraordinary history of this morbidly fascinating drug who know that the India grown British drug was pushed and smuggled and bayoneted into China during a century of desperate protest and even armed resistance from these yellow people it has been a popular argument to assert that the Chinese have only themselves to blame for the jdemand that made the trade possible Of this demand and of how it was worked up by Christian traders I shall speak at some length in a later article Educational methods in the extending of trade can hardly be said to have originated with the modern trust The curious fact is that the Chinese did n t use opium and did n t want opium Yet when the Christians with fleets and treaties had forced their way in opium first the imported then the new native grown swept over the empire like a scourge until to day it menaces China's very existence I have myself been in regions where formerly prosperous families are going to pieces at such an appalling rate that the son of a prominent merchant will be found selling the tiles of his roof and the woodwork of his doors and windows in order to buy the drug The inevitable next step after selling his daughter into slavery is to take his family out on the highroad to beg For the confirmed opium smoker cannot keep up in the struggle for existence The only thing he is fit for is more smoking In the stricken province of Shansi a common remark runs to this effect Eleven out of every ten Shansi men smoke opium A high provincial official put it to me in other words when he said grimly Everybody smokes in Shansi Shansi is but one remember of the seven opium provinces containing together a population of more than one hundred and fifty millions And opium is raised and consumed extensively in every one of the eleven other provinces.

Perhaps the most convincing summing up of China's desperate predicament is found in another translation from a recent Chinese document this time an appeal to the throne from four viceroys The quaintness of the language does not I think impaii its effectiveness and its power as a protest China can never become strong ard stand shoulder to shoulder with the powers of the world i ri e i she can get rid of the habit of opium smoking by her subjects about one quarter of whom have 1 steamed up and down river been reduced to skeletons and look half dead.

It is curious I have suggested that if opium really is new to the Chinese it should have so rapidly gained the upper hand of this huge race Curious but not inexplicable Let me quote from a man who has contributed what promisesto be the last word on the psychology of opium poisoning What was it says De Quincey that did in reality make me an opium eater That affection which finally drove me into the habitur use of opium what was it Pain was it No but misery Casual overcasting of sunshine was it No but blank desolation Gloom was it that might have departed No but settled and abiding darkness And how did De Quincey come to know that opium could relieve misery Because he had taken it before for toothache and had experienced its subtler effects.

Beginning the Habit

Your true opium smoker stretches himself on a divan and gives up ten or fifteen minutes to preparing his thimbleful of the brown drug When it has been heated and worked to the proper consistency he laces it in the tiny bowl of his pipe holds it over a low lamp and raws a few whiffs of the smoke deep into his lungs It seems at first a trivial thing indeed the man who is well fed and properly housed and clothed seems able to keep it up for a considerable time without noticeable ill results The great difficulty in China is of course this that very few opium smokers are well fed and properly housed and clothed.


I heard little about the beautiful dreams and visions which opium is supposed to bring all the smokers with whom I talked could be roughly divided into two classes those who smoked in order to relieve pain or misery and those miserable victims who smoked to relieve the acute physical distress brought on by the opium itself Probably the majority of the victims take it up asja temporary relief many begin in early childhood the mother will give the baby a whiff to stop its crying It is a social vice only among the upper classes The most notable outward effect of this indulgence is the resulting physical weakness and lassitude The opium smoker cannot work hard he finds it difficult to apply his mind to a problem or his body to a task As the habit becomes firmly fastened on him there is a perceptible weakening of his moral fiber he shows himself unequal to emergencies which make any sudden demand upon him If opium is denied him he will lie and steal in order fo obtain it.


Opium smoking is a costly vice A pipeful of a moderately good native product costs more than a laborer can earn in a day consequently the poorer classes smoke an unspeakable compound based on pipe scrapings and charcoal Along the highroads the coolies even scrape the grime from the packsaddles to mix with this dross The clerk earning from twenty five to fifty Mexican dollars a month will frequently spend from ten to twenty dollars a month on opium The typical confirmed smoker is a man who spends a considerable part of the night in smoking himself fo sleep and all the next morning in sleeping off the effects If he is able to work at all it is only during the afternoon and even at that there will be many days when the official or merchant is incompetent to conduct his affairs Thousands of prominent men are ruined every year.

The Cannots of the Cantonese

The Cantonese have what they call The Ten Cannots regarding the Opium Smoker He cannot (1) give up the habit (2) enjoy sleep (3) wait for his turn when sharing his pipe with his friends (4) rise early (5) be cured if sick (6) help relations in need (7) enjoy wealth (8 ) plan anything (9) get credit even when an old customer (10) walk any distance.

This is the land into which the enterprising Christian traders introduced opium and into which they fed opium so persistently and forcibly that at last a good market was developed England did not set out to ruin China One finds no hint of a diabolical purpose to seduce and destroy a wonderful old empire on the other side of the world The ruin worked was incidental to that Far Eastern trade of which England has been so proud It was the triumph of the balance sheet over common humanity.

And so it is to day British India still holds the cream of the trade for the Chinese grown opium cannot compete in quality with the Indian drug The British Indian government raises the poppy in the rich Ganges Valley more than six hundred thousand acres of poppies they raised there last year manufactures it in government factories at Patna and Ghazipur manufactures four fifths of it especially to suit the Chinese taste and sells it at annual government auctions in Calcutta.

I came back over the rim through the same sunken roads over the same brand new railroad where they discounted my Mexican dollars ten per cent through the same dusty crowded Chien Men Gate and into the

(Continued on page 696)

648 SUCCESS MAGAZINE
‘What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’
— Lord Melbourne —

Diogenes
Posts: 6968
Joined: Mon Jun 15, 2009 3:33 pm

Post by Diogenes »

Image


Drugging a Race
By SAMUEL MERWIN


[Concluded from page 648]

same Wagon lits hotel where thanks to a tidal wave of heedless searchers after Cloisonne and Mandarin coats I had to sleep in the barber shop But for a matter of hours on that first night after my return to the world my eyes refused to close I had seen China More I had seen the drama the wonderful drama of a drug 1 knew now that 1 had been seeing it from the first that the hard drinking loud talking ones of the Coast were a part of it that the gunboats and the flags and the mission compounds and the paved boulevards of the Yang tse ports were a part of it that the cynical diplomats and the gavly clad legation guards that even this identical Grand hotel des Wagon lits were all a part of it.

One other part I saw or thought 1 saw and this it was which kept my eyes wide open that night in the barber shop 1 had happened on the biggest story in the world It was the fight to a finish between four hundred million human souls and a drug with the odds on the drug. There never has been a spectacle quite like it in this bewildering old world of ours Just as Old China itself suggests the life and times of the Old Testament so this story suggested the wonder tales of the Old Testament With this difference it was real it was of to day I had seen it The hard drinking ones had done the rough work the cynical ones had done the fine work it had been every man for himself and the devil had taken the hindmost.

I have said that the theme of this drama is the triumph of the balance sheet over common humanity This first article has concerned itself with our common humanity The next article will concern itself with the balance sheet and will tell how China fell It is a strange tragedy 1 think it will be interesting To be continued next month
‘What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’
— Lord Melbourne —

Diogenes
Posts: 6968
Joined: Mon Jun 15, 2009 3:33 pm

Post by Diogenes »

No doubt Mr. SAMUEL MERWIN was lying, or had been tricked by American Government propaganda from the future.
‘What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’
— Lord Melbourne —

TDPerk
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Joined: Mon Jul 30, 2007 12:55 pm
Location: Northern Shen. Valley, VA
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Post by TDPerk »

Diogenes wrote:No doubt Mr. SAMUEL MERWIN was lying, or had been tricked by American Government propaganda from the future.
Diogenes trots out his meaningless historical outlier again, which has been replicated nowhere in history, even if it was just what he claims.

In the real world, where what he claims for China has most likely never happened there and certainly nowhere else, we know what happens when Americans have unlimited access to drugs provided by the free market--not darn much; our own history proves Prohibition is all cost and no benefit.
molon labe
montani semper liberi
para fides paternae patria

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