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