The opium eater has no such reprieves; his dose must be taken, and, in painful complications affecting the stomach, a large increase is demanded to sustain the system. If, in forming the habit, two doses are taken each day, the victim is obliged to maintain that number. It is the unceasing, everlasting slavery of regularity that humiliates opium eaters by a sense of their own weakness.--HUBBARD _on The Opium Habit and Alcoholism._] The seductive nature of the drug leads the unfortunate victim on step by step until he finds himself fast bound in the fetters of one of the most tyrannical habits known to man. To go on is to wreck all one's powers--physical and mental. To throw off the habit, requires a determination that but few possess. Yet even when the custom is broken, the system is long in recovering from the shock. There seems to be a failure of every organ. The digestion is weakened, food is no longer relished, the muscles waste, the skin shrivels, the nervous centers are paralyzed, and a premature old age comes on apace. De Quincey, four months after he had cast away the opium bonds, wrote, "Think of me as one still agitated, writhing, throbbing, palpitating, shattered." No person can be too careful in the use of laudanum, paregoric, and morphine. They may be taken on a physician's prescription as a sedative from racking pain, [Footnote: Many persons learn to inject morphine beneath the skin by means of a "hypodermic syringe." The operation is painless, and seems an innocent one. It throws the narcotic directly into the circulation, and relief from pain is often almost instantaneous. But the danger of forming the opium habit is not lessened, and the effect of using the drug in this form for a long time is just as injurious as opium smoking itself. Opium in one of its forms enters largely into the composition of many of the painkillers and patent medicines so freely advertised for domestic use in the present day, and for this reason the greatest care is needed in having recourse to any of them. Taken, perhaps, in the first instance, to alleviate the torments of neuralgia or toothache, what proves to be a remedy soon becomes a source of gratification, which the wretchedness that follows on abstinence renders increasingly difficult to lay aside. The same must be said of bromide of potassium and hydrate of chloral, frequently resorted to as a remedy for sleeplessness: the system quickly becomes habituated to their use, and they can then be relinquished only at the cost of much suffering. Indeed, the last mentioned of these two drugs obtains over the mind a power which may be compared to that of opium, and is, moreover, liable to occasion the disease known as chloralism, by which the system ultimately becomes a complete wreck. Looking at the whole question of the medicinal use of narcotics, it is perhaps not too much to say that they should never be employed except with the authority of a competent medical adviser.--