Recommendation: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

Nineteenth-century autobiographical poetic treatise on (and, in some ways, a defence of) drug addiction written by Thomas De Quincey, a member of the English aristocracy.

Describes opium as the ‘one sole catholic anodyne’, but also depicts the torment of addiction with ornate gusto.

Wonderful passage:

‘For opium (like the bee, that extracts its materials indiscriminately from roses and from the soots of chimneys) can overrule all feelings into a compliance with the master-key. Some of these rambles led me to great distances; for an opium-eater is too happy to observe the motion of time. And sometimes, in my attempts to steer homewards, upon nautical principles, by fixing my eye on the pole-star, and seeking ambitiously for a north-west passage, instead of circumnavigating all the capes and headlands I had doubled in my outward voyage, I came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys without soundings, such enigmatical entries, and such sphinx’s riddles of streets without obvious outlets or thoroughfares, as must baffle the audacity of porters, and confound the intellects of hackney coachmen.’