The Oregon daily journal., August 09, 1908, Page 25, Image 25

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Alarming Growth of
ium Habit on
Pacific Coast
CALIFORNIA, after a year of cru-
sade on the part of its state Board
of Pharmacy, today regards with
unqualified horror and alarm the fearful
spread of opium smoking among the whites,
and especially in high social circles.
IV omen who are prominent in the best
society, matrons whose family name are
synonymous with the hardy virtues which
made the state tlu golden crown of the na
tion's western empire; young girls, delicate
and sweet as the perfumed flowers they
wear at their bosoms when presented in
their innocence to the world at their debut
all these, and thousands more in every
class of California society, and young men
at the threshold of usefulness, have fallen
victims to the enslaving habit of the poi'
sonous drug.
Corrupt, and in their turn corrupting,
these distinguished, loatlisome failures of
the white civilization, in its contact tath the
vice of the barbaric Orient, have set on the
road to the penitentiary the fcet of the
very messenger boys whom they hired to
procure for them the opium they were
IT "WAS an early Sunday morning, still
dark with the passing night, and chill
with the earliest air of the dawn, when a
mad Babel of cries and ycjls and thud
ding blows turned the shanties of, San Fran
cisco's renascent Chinatown into a grotesque
fantasy of the turmoil of dissipation that had
fallen quiet toward midnight, a few hours be
fore. Presently the doors gare way, apd the
ahanties vomited the police and their captire
half naked white men, collapsing at every
ether ttep under the opium stupor, the
opiumweat on their biraTheiU burning fey
in the morning air; slant-eyed Chinamen,
parchment-dried and malodorous with the
tench of the stale, burpeu drug, but alert as
ferret surprised at a "feast of blood; boys,
whiU boys, partly dazed,, half scared and half
impudent tie vile, unutterable spew of the '
frpiuza dens, diarwtin to tee, alckefii&f to
Uoium Habit on tne IV; V. Li . Tz!
1 ...Ji.V.'...' .uu.a-u-a,.'.
PORTLAND,
the
the
reluctant to buy openly for them
selves. Yet, apart from the vast array of
women who have preserved the shame
ful secret of their downfall at the cost
of vitiating forever the morals of the
children they hired as messengers,
there remain hundreds perfectly well
known to the authorities in the course
of the crusade who, with the utmost
nonchalance, with the most unassumed
effrontery, drive up in their automo
biles, alight at the favorite druggist's,
and buy their "dope" as coolly as ig
norant mothers used to buy paregoric in
the days when it was fashionable to have
children instead of pipe dreams.
Scores of pharmacists the most
prominent of San Francisco and other large
cities have been convicted of poisoning
the people for the sake of the increased
revenue which the illegitimate sale of opium
brought. The trail led straight to the
American drug store from the place of its
unsavory origin, in vile and criminal China
town. And the end of the crusade is still afar.
The cure of the vice is not even within the
range of hope.
smell, objects of horror to every normal sense
with which humanity is endowed.
And in their midst was a girL young, beau
tiful, fashionably attired, whose patent refine
ment and seeming innocence shocked even the
varied experience of the policemen who ar
rested ber.
Her eyes dulled with the poisonous fumes
she had inhaled, her ycung, 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 irC who had come from an in
terior town to enjoy a complete debauch, im
possible 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 hepeful, released ber
on the chance that bom influence might aave
her, where imprisonment would doom the last
remnant ef her self -respect.
Hp forty Opmm Ben ft? -Jf ' I i A : - S
Francisco. C&fk k,J : -v . " t
OREGON, SUNDAY MORNING, AUGUST 9, 1908
She was the extreme type, yet only one of
hundreds of women of the Pacific slope v.ho are
now falling victims to the curse of opium.
For a year the coast has been subjected to
a continual series of suocks over the discovery
that the vice of the Orient, against which tho
unmitigated despotism of China has struggled
in vain through the generations, has fastened
itself upon the best of its population?
Women who are the mothers of to'iay, girls
who are to bo the mothers of tomorrow, alike
succumb to the baleful influences oi the de
structive drug.
Nor are they poor women. The spread of
the opium habit has been most astounding,
most alarming, among women of thse classes
whose wealth, intelligence and refinement
should have most effectively safeguarded them
from its dangers.
The case of the beautiful girl mentioned
her name is withheld for charity's sake drawn
by her mad infatuation from a quiet, respectable
interior home to the stews of San Francisco's
filthy. Chinatown and plunged into companion
ahip with the most abandoned and lascivious
wretches the world knows, served merely to
point the moral to which all California has
been aroused.
Her arrest simply afforded the "horrible
example" that so infamously crowns widespread
indulgence in any vice, from alcohol to opium.
The police of San Francisco could quote
cores of similar downfalls of girls quite aa
young, of women equally charming. But the
rule has been that their moral degeneration was
a thing very thoroughly accomplished long be
fore their bloated or emaciated bodies tank to
the depths of the Chinatown opium derlK
Chinatown is usually the ultimate inferno
ef the female "dope fiend," reached after she
kaa been abandoned by even the Boat reckleee
aad least discrimintthis; of whit admirers.
when she is so utterly lost to even her pride of
raee that she will consent to become tho fa
miliar associate of the Chinese, yet, oftentimes,
disdained even by those carrion craving sensual
ists. The cocaine and opium habits appear to go
hand in hand toward the enervation of com
munities, cocaine claiming more victims in tho
Kast, opium appearing the master vice in the
West.
In San Francisco, particularly, the use of
opium in the form imported by tho thousands
constituting the more degraded element of tho
Chinese colony, as a frankly inhaled smoke
from the opium pipe, has set upon the white
race the stamp of quick corruption by the in
ferior yellows it has so long tolerated and
despised.
. A strange, almost unique spectacle in sociol
ogy has been presented in San Francisco during
the prime of the generation past and the ma
turity of the generation present. ,
Set in the midt of the most perfect en
vironment nature has ever aSorde-l mankind
since humanity knew itself for a species dis
tinct and apart, inspired to physical perfec
tion by the most favoring climate that has ever
impelled man toward perfect development, the
children of the most hardy and darinir pioneers
ever sent ferth by a hardy nation of pioneers
have grown and thrived with a luxuriance of
strength which remains the wonder of all trav
elers. To tbem, and to their prodigal wealth of
natural resources, beside which the gold of
California has proved to be the trmal board
of some barbarian chief as compared witn ine
sands cf Paelolus or the treasures of the In-
dies, came the lean, starved, vulture-taloned ,
yellow coolies of China, stringy-muscled with ,
ses of hunger, desperate with tho need for a
tire living, and cursed with the ineradicable ,
curse of the opium.
It was tho curse that had been. .thrust upon
their race by Great Britain, the nation that !
never ceased to enslave human bodies so long,
as her arms could rivet the chains of their j
slavery, and never refrained from cankering j
human souls so long aa another canker of their
ruin could put another shilling in her pocket, j
The curse, originating in the British Par-j
Lament, foisted by British bayonets upon the j
helpless, ignorant, readily corrupted East, came'
with the coolies to San Francisco, a trail of .
poisonous blight that lay more than 21,000 milea
around the habitable globe as far, indeed, aa
the House of Parliament, in London. i
And San Francisco at first welcoming be- (
cause it needed labor, then tolerant because
the strangers had the cunning to dissemble their ;
strength, then riotous because the band .Lota
felt that strength in their very stomachs, and
declared the Chinese must go, and finally vain
of the barbaric colony that flaunted its in
eongruities amid the bald prose of an Anglo
Saxon commnnity accorded to the silent,
bribe-giving, secret, alien oligarchy of its
Chinatown the rights and privileges of soma
impregnable city. .
Frankly, San Francisco became proud of
its Chinatown, as Chicago was proud ot it
shambles, as New York was prooJ of its Ten
derloin, as Africa might be proud of its inn
pies. In snite of Herself, she had nourished and
fostered another wonder of the world, and all
the world dwelt, in imagination, upon the mys
terious rrnninm of San i'rshcisoo's Chinatown,
even as, in imagination, on w. v. u-
sports ef the bull fight in Spam sad npoa tie
marvels of the shops in Lahore,
Of the strange and wondrous rer-sarx- ut
dwelt hidden there ia Chinatown, the t-us
, tcoxnxcxn OH ixsrcn tagiii