King Lamus Intervenes 249
sing remark However, I could see that he was very
fortable ‘and glad to get away from our table.
We had ordered a wonderful dinner; but, of course,
vawe couldn’t eat anything. The mockery of having all
| those expensive dishes brought, one after the other,
and taken away again untouched, was irritating at
} first, and then it began to be amusing. ely
icipating in some weird ceremony
ans. The thought
mind that we already died, that
cking welcome ades, the offering
we were unabjé to partake. d yet,
between us and the unknown was the act of drinking
e contents of the little bottlein my waistcoat pocket.
It was nearly an hour and a half since we had some
heroin, and already the loathsome fumes of abstention
were suffocating us. We had as much as our bodies
could tolerate. We didn’t want any more actively.
It would do us no good to take more, but nature had
already begun her process of eliminating the poison.
In the body, morphine and heroin become oxydised,
and it is the resulting poisons, not the drugs themselves,
i“ that are responsible for the appalling effects. Thus
the body begins to give off these products through the
secretions; therefore the nose begins to run; there
are prolonged foul sweats; there is a smell and a taste
which cannot be called unpleasant even, it can only be
called abominable in the proper sense of that word:
that which is repugnant to man. It is so detestable as
to be unendurable. One might get relief by cleaning
one’s teeth or by having a Turkish bath, but the energy
to do such things is lacking.
But if you take a fresh dose of the drug, it puts a
War temporary stop to the efforts of nature to eliminate it.
That is why it is such a vicious circle; and these
| premonitory symptoms of abstinence are merely the