The Opium Habit

This volume has been compiled chiefly for the benefit of opium-eaters. 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.