This is not an overdrawn picture, but one of which instances are constantly to be met with. The enslaving habit of alcohol, when once contracted, is too well known to need description. Opium comes next in the point of influence it exerts over its victims, and a very small percentage ever free themselves from the habit when it is once contracted. In most instances it is taken in the first place to relieve some severe pain, as in De Quincey's case. He says, in his _Confessions of an Opium Eater_, "It was not for the purpose of creating pleasure, but of mitigating pain in the severest degree, that I first began to use opium as an article of daily diet." Like others, he was compelled to increase the dose gradually, until at last he consumed the enormous quantity of 320 grains of the drug a day. He graphically describes the struggle he first had to reduce the daily dose, and found that to a certain point it could be reduced with ease, but after that point, further reduction caused intense suffering. However, a crisis arrived, and he writes, "I saw that I must die if I continued the opium. I determined, therefore, if that should be required, to die in throwing it off. I apprehend at this time I was taking from 50 or 60 grains to 150 grains a day. My first task was to reduce it to 40, to 30, and as fast as I could to 12 grains. I triumphed; but think not my sufferings were ended. Think of me, as one, even when four months had passed, still agitated, writhing, throbbing, palpitating, shattered; and much perhaps in the situation of him who has been racked." Other cases are commonly met with in this country, where opium eaters take on an average from 60 to 80 grains of the drug a day. The smallest quantity which has proved fatal in the adult is 4½ grains; in other cases enormous quantities have been taken with impunity; and Guy states recovery once took place after no less than eight ounces of solid opium had been swallowed.