The Hawaiian star. [volume] (Honolulu [Oahu]) 1893-1912, 1908-09-21
ALARMING SPREAD
OF OPIUM HABIT
ENORMOUS PROFITS LEAD TO
ILLICIT SALE-WHITE MEN AND
WOMEN BECOME VICTIMS.

A recent crusade in California against
the increasing use of opium by whites
reveal a most alarming condition on
the Pacific Coast. The report of con-
ditions there tell of vast array of wo-
men who have become victims to the
awful habit. Some of these white
ladies of wealth and fashion drive up
in their automobiles, alight at the fa-
vorite druggists, and buy their dope"
as coolly as ignorant mothers used to
buy paregoric in the days when it was
fashionable to have children instead of
pipe dreams.
Scores of pharmacisJs--the most pro-
minent of San Francisco and other
large ciues-have been convicted of
poisoning the people for the sake of
the increased revenue which the lille
Ultimate sale of opium brought.
'And the end of the crusade is still
afar. The cure of the vice is not even
within the range of hope"
OPIUM RAID.
The fearful story of present condi-
lions i'll San Francisco and other parts
OF the United States seem almost be-
yond belief. A recent account of All
early Sunday morning raid on one of
San Francisco's opium dens gives the
following sad picture:
Presently the doors gave way, and
the shanties vomited the police and
their captives-half naked white men,
collapsing at every other step under
the opium stupor, and boys, white
boys, partly dazed, half scared and half
impudent-the vile, unutterable spew
of the opium dens, disgusting to see,
sickening to smell, objects of horror to
every normal sense with which human
ity is endowed.
"And in their midst was a girl,
young, beautiful, fashionably attired,
whose patent refinement and seeming
innocence shocked even the varied ex-
perience of the policemen who arrest
ed her.
Her eyes dulled with the poisonous
fumes she had inhaled, her young,
graceful figure swaying in the effort to
walk unaided by the degrading touch
of the law that was rescuing her from
the deepest degradation possible for a
woman, this girl who had come from
an interior town to enjoy a complete
debauch, impossible for her in her own
home, was led to the police station
with the rest, registered with the rest,
and only separated from them when
the authorities, pitiful and hopeful, re-
leased her on the chance that home in
fluences might save her, where i'm
prisonment would doom the last rem
nants of her self-respect
"She was the extreme type, yet only
one of hundreds of women of the Pa
cific slope who are now falling victims
to the course of opium"
OPIUM ON THE INCREASE.
The use of opium through the United
States is largely increasing, although
the number of Chinese in the country
is less than formerly. This points to
the use of the drug by whites. From
1903 to 1905 the imports of crude opium
into the United States was one million
pounds more than in the preceding
five year period! In 1878 $4,000 pounds
of smoking opium was imported into
the United STAGES. In 1907 the impor-
tation was about three times as much
of $4,000 pounds One transpacific
mail steamer, recently touching at Ho-
, nolulu carried a cargo of opium valued
at $250,000. DIR. Hamilton Wright, one
of the American Commissioners to the
coming opium conference at Shanghai,
January /, 1909, has been making a
study of the subject. He finds that
over 5000 whites are slaves to the
opium habit in New York city alone.
The State Board of Pharmacy of Cali
| fornia has been making crusade
against the sale of opium in violation
of law. It's work shows that: ION the
very eve of the arrest of the pretty girl
mentioned above, the board had re-
cord of forty-four prominent druggists
arrested and convicted of CALIFORNIA;
peculiar crime; and at the time no
fewer than twenty-five other promi-
nent druggists of San Francisco were
under accusation in the local courts
for the same offense.''
The reason of this condition is the
enormous profits from this forbidden
trade.
Opium, like cocaine, has attached
to its retail the quickest riches that
ever came out of deliberate poisoning.
A tin of opium costs Sc. so to the drug
gist or the keeper of the den That
quantity retailed in the doses called
for by the habits victims, brings
$4,000"
In Honolulu also few realize the ex,