The Seven Sisters of Sleep: Popular History of the Seven Prevailing Narcotics of the WorldCooke, M. C. (Mordecai Cubitt)
History
The Seven Sisters of Sleep: Popular History of the Seven Prevailing Narcotics of the World
Cooke, M. C. (Mordecai Cubitt)
Drug abuse; Narcotics; Psychotropic drugs; Psychotropic plants; Tobacco use
“II.—Resolved. That we regard the use of tobacco as an expensive and
needless indulgence, unfavourable to cleanliness and good manners,
unbecoming in Christians, and especially in Christian Ministers,
and, like the use of alcohol, a violation of the laws of physical,
intellectual, and moral life.
III.—Resolved. “That we will discountenance the use of that injurious
narcotic, except as a medicine prescribed by a physician, by precept
and example, and by all proper means.”
De Lagny states that the “Old Believers”, a sect of dissenters from the
Greek Church in Russia, look with horror on the use of tobacco. The
Wahhabees, a Pharasaical sect of strict Moslems, are rigid in their
condemnation of tobacco, and in their adherence to the precepts of the
Koran, and the traditions of the Prophet.
There are to be met with nearer home, those who are inveterate against
its use, and who willingly join with Cowper in denouncing the
“Pernicious weed which banishes for hours,
That sex whose presence civilizes ours.”
An occasional pamphlet or letter, makes its way into the hands of
speculative publishers or into class papers, giving gratuitous advice,
and much denunciatory language, against a habit which is by far too
general, and has been tested by too many experiments not to be well
known, and equally well understood. These “counterblasts” differ but
little from the model one which each would seem to aim at imitating—the
quaint expressions, the only redeeming quality in the original, alone
being wanting.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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