Diary of a Drug Fiend

268 The Diary of a Drug Fiend “‘ Well,” he said, “it certainly is extraordinary stuff if it does two precisely opposite things at the will of the taker.” oo, He spoke sarcastically. He refrained from telling me what he told me long afterwards, that the apparently contradictory properties that I was ascribing to it were really there, that it can be used by the expert to produce a number of effects, some of which seem at first sight mutually exclusive. ‘* Well, look here, Sir Peter,’”’ went on Lamus. ‘ You can’t have it both ways. You really ought to make up your mind as to the purpose of taking a dose.” I replied rather piteously that we had found out long ago that we couldn’t sleep without it. Mabel Black had told us that. ‘And the result of that delusion,” returned Lamus “‘is that she’s dead. I think your experience has been influenced by her foolish remark. You have told me yourself that the delightful result, in the first instance, was to keep you lying awake all night in a state of suspended animation, with a most fascinating flow of fancies filling your brain.” I had to admit the truth of what he said. “Heroin,” he explained, ‘‘is a modification of morphine, and morphine is the most active of the principles of opium. Now surely you remember what Wilkie Collins says in The Moonstone about opium and its preparations, that they have a stimulating effect followed by a sedative effect. Heroin is much more positive in its action than opium; and the reasonable thing to do, as it seems to me, would be to go ahead with it pretty hard in the morning and keep yourself going by that means, but to leave it entirely alone for some hours before you go to bed, so that the sedative effect may send you nicely to sleep at the proper time. I know the objection to that. The abuse of the drug has left you full of nervous irritability. The reason why you want heroin at night is to deaden yourself to that. When you take it in the morning after a