THE STAR TRIBUNE

Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A.

14 September 1930

(page 57)

Exposing Traffic in DOPE the World’s Wickedest

EVIL All Over the Globe TODAY.

This Week: Secrets of the “Opium Vampires’

“Luxurious Hideaways, Where Men, From

Bankers to College Boys, Woo the Deadly Poppy.

By BRUCE GRANT.

MASTER OF DOPE.

Note the Powerful Facial Characteristics and Mesmeric Eyes

of Aleister Crowley, Mystic British Poet and Demonologist,

Who Experimented with Hasheesh Without Becoming Enslaved.

The modern history of devil lore in America is written around the opium poppy.

It is the goal of tortured imaginations, it sinks its claws into the very soul, it deadens the salutary path that man needs as a spur to self-preservation. It crawls across the borders, over sea and land, through schools and colleges, in and out of public institutions and private homes—it even invades the cradle itself!

Playing the stellar role in this great drama of the poppy is the “opium vampire”—pretty, dainty, smartly gowned, mysterious. She is an alluring figure against a background of college, night club and flashy restaurant activities, at the smart dances, the opera, the races, always drawing her victims into a web woven from the black smoke-threads of opium.

Of all the drug scouts, pluggers for the siren songs of dope, the most dangerous, perhaps, are these “opium vampires.” Set up in their luxurious dens by the kingpins of the drug ring, these harpies are the lure for men of prominence, intellect, social standing and wealth. The apartments of these women are the limbos of lost men, and more than one well-to-do “amnesia victim” has been corralled there by the police, while frantic relatives and friends scurried about to hush up the scandal.

The “opium vampire” is the “stooge” (drug peddler) de luxe. Close behind her, in lugubrious procession, come the trafficking doctor, the unscrupulous druggist, the ordinary sidewalk “crimp” and last—and most vicious of all—the vendor of drugs to little school children at the soda fountain, across the candy counter, around the corner from the public school. These latter ensnare their innocent victims and then set them up as passers of dope to their classmates, giving them as pay a “deck” or two of their soul-destroying poisons.

That there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of infant drug addicts in America, is but one of the startling phases of the narcotic evil today. Sara Graham-Mulhall, formerly First Deputy Commissioner of the Narcotic Drug Control of New York State, says:

“Frequently I am called on the telephone by physicians who consult me as to the proper morphine dose for a baby addict. In our short experience we registered 55 infant addicts! When our narcotic control was discontinued we had on our register 800 expectant-mother addicts, which medical experts insist means 800 babies almost certain to be given drugs.”

Parents who at first notice an unusual air of maturity and worldly wisdom about their twelve-year-old school child sometimes force themselves to male allowance for the strangeness of a new generation. But later they are horrified to learn that this sudden precocity is the result of addiction—that the peddler has secretly enslaved their beloved one to the use of narcotics.

These cases are more numerous than one imagines. The horror of this addiction among school children is not yet fully realized, American authorities say, so sly is its system, so secretive are its youthful slaves, so passive to spiritual development are the great majority of mothers and fathers, and so fearful are these latter of the stigma of court proceedings.

Continuing into the higher education in drug-taking, one finds in colleges what is known as “experimental addiction.” Here boys and girls, students of classroom psychology, where instructors urge the recording of personal sensations, band together secretly to taste for themselves the morbid titillation of drug-taking, later to report to one another their feelings and emotions while under the influence of narcotics. But, alas, it takes but ten days, more or less, to become a slave of opium, and so the student soon finds himself or herself a narcotic addict. Suicides of college students in the last year, which are on the increase, are very often traced to drug addiction.

While the “opium vampire” is one of the chief causes of the college boy’s fall into addiction, it is from the ranks of the college girl that many of these sirens are recruited. The college girl, with her high-strung mentality, her pride and her feminine arts of deception, is rarely involved in such obvious scandal as is the college boy. Drug-taking is generally a secret vice with her—at first. The drug may be prescribed by the physician to allay her highly nervous temperament.

This condition of nerves is apt to prevail, too, among people of the stage, writers, and other sensitive, impressionable artists. A tragic instance was the case of lovely Julia Bruns, a gifted actress, who became a prey to cocaine, but by a heroic effort cured herself, only to die before she was thirty after a gin party.

The reverse of the medal is Aleister Crowley, British mystic and poet, who experimented with hasheesh. He never became enslaved, but this is not to depreciate the horrors of this drug. Crowley shook off the habit because he was a man of terrific will power.

Crowley’s “case” verges on the unique in that he resorted to drugs, not through boredom or despair or any of the other complex emotional factors that cause man to seek the “artificial paradises” of Thomas De Quincey. Instead, Crowley took hasheesh deliberately, in order to test the sensations and record them with a cold, detached scientific interest.

As soon as he had satisfied himself that he knew all there was to be known, by the layman, about this drug, he abruptly broke off the practice and never again permitted himself a similar indulgence. His views on drugs—cocaine, heroin, hasheesh—he embodied in a remarkable novel, which was at one time the sensation of literary London. Especially valuable was his chapter dealing with the effect of narcotics on the mind and body of a young woman who played a leading part in the development of the story’s plot.

The co-ed may begin her drug taking on the advice of another girl, who assures her that a mild narcotic will “keep her fit and normal.” She becomes a slave. She soon finds herself without resources to buy the drug and her next step is to quietly ballyhoo for the drug peddler, that she may receive as her reward her daily quota of “junk.”

Only in the final stages of dissipation does opium destroy a woman’s beauty. Often it improves it, as the candle burns brightest just before it flickers out.

Many of the “opium vampires” come from the ranks of hospital workers and trained nurses and even from the training schools for nurses. Propinquity to the drug causes the downfall of many, who while those in training are recruited after the manner of the college girl.

The unscrupulous men of the drug ring find as their most valuable tools actresses, both on the legitimate stage and screen who have fallen slaves to narcotics. These women are elaborately snared into association with the drug vendors with the utmost patience. These charming and attractive scouts are then used as lures to capture rich men, or the sons of wealthy parents, and they are behind many blackmail cases and breach of promise suits.

Sometimes these beautiful vampires learn too much for the ease of mind of the higher-ups. They are then put out of the way by a simple overdose of morphine—a convenient method, as no trace of the drug is usually found at an autopsy. But many times, when their beauty fades, they take this overdose themselves.

The “opium vampire” does not confine herself to “plugging” opium or its derivatives—heroin and morphine—or to cocaine. She finds sometimes that the simpler forms of addiction, smoking marihuana, the Mexican “loco weed,” or even sniffing ether are good as starters because invariably the addict will look for something with a stronger kick.

Opium smoking is said by certain medical authorities to be the least harmful form of addiction. One who does eight hours a day of manual labor will not seriously suffer, they contend. But smoking leads to morphine addiction and morphine to heroin.

Paradoxically, morphine was first introduced into China as a cure for the opium-smoking habit! And heroin was brought to America from Germany to cure the morphine habit! Needless to say a sniff of heroin, the most potent of narcotics, will take one off of morphine in no time.

While opium smoking is giving way to the addiction to manufactured drugs in China, the custom of smoking is becoming quite common in the United States. China, in trying to shake off the age-old yoke of opium addiction, finds herself swamped with narcotic drugs.

M. Chao-Hsin Chu, Chinese representative on the Opium Advisory Committee of the League of Nations, recently expressed himself as “most alarmed at the figures of the manufacture of morphine and other dangerous drugs.

“The amount of morphine in use is far in excess of the amount required for legitimate purposes,” he said. “However, China is not to be found on the list of countries producing morphine, but she has suffered more than any other country so far as the consumption of morphine is concerned. Since China has prohibited the smuggling of opium by law, her people have taken to the far more harmful drug, morphia. An injection of morphia is entirely absorbed by the whole body and is about one hundred times more harmful than a pipe of opium.

“An opium smoker can live to a normal number of years, but a person addicted to the morphine habit dies after two or three years. . . It seems to me that the morphine-producing countries are competing with one another, owing to the fact that the business is a very profitable one, although the profits go only to the smugglers and a few manufacturers. The governments of these countries gain very little revenue from licenses, but lose a great deal in prestige and reputation. I cannot understand why civilized nations can allow such a scandalous state of affairs to continue unchecked.”

Judging by the labels on narcotics seized in China during the past few years, the International Anti-Opium Association estimates that Japan has thirteen, Germany, five; Great Britain, two; Switzerland, three; France, one, and the United States, six manufacturers of drugs. The association admits that these figures may not be correct. For instance, Japan claims to have but four factories.

The association believes, however that “at the worst” there cannot be more than thirty drug factories in the world and therefore the manufacture of drugs should not be difficult to control.

While opium smoking is spreading as a vice in America, the Chinese, even in this country, are gradually discontinuing it. The Chinese tongs, long linked with the smuggling of opium into this country, have gone into the more lucrative business of narcotic transportation—that is, those tongs of unscrupulous character.

Chinese tong leaders have long frowned on opium smoking among their members. Especially among the boo how doy, or hired assassins of the tong. Two of the greatest hatchet-men, Gout Sink Duck and Hong Ah Kay, would not employ a killer who was addicted to opium smoking.