Confessions of an Opium-Eater

DeQuincey, T. (1821). Confessions of an Opium eater. London Dent, 1960. 

British essayist Thomas De Quincey publishes Confessions of an Opium Eater. It is one of the first accounts of the process of addiction. 

Paracelsus prepared opium dissolved in alcohol which was known as laudanum and used it as an analgesic for pain relief Opium was also used to induce sleep and for the treatment of diarrhoea (morphine is still used for this). As a result of trading and invasion, the use of opium spread throughout the Middle East, parts of Europe, and the Far East. Opium taken in preparations by mouth as tinctures, or even in cakes by the Chinese, proved to be very popular and to have many uses. It was widely used both for medicinal purposes and for the euphoric elTects it induced as described by writers and poets, for example Thomas De Quincey in Confessions of an Opium Eater. 

Not everyone agreed. Thomas De Quincey, author of Confessions of an Opium Eater, rejected cannabis as the sorrow-killing agent mentioned by Homer preferring his own favorite, opium, which he regarded as a "panacea, a pharmakon nepenthes" for all woes. 

The Artificial Paradises is divided into two parts. The first contains Baudelaire s "Poem of Hashish" the second is a translation of de Quincey s Confessions of an Opium Eater. Baudelaire s inclusion of these two works into a single volume was due to his feeling that both drags produced very similar effects. Indeed, it is sometimes impossible to tell whether Baudelaire is writing about opium or hashish in various parts of his "Poem of Hashish". 

It was while he worked for the White Cross that Rowell paraded up and down the southwest lecturing against marihuana. But although he claimed that he had been "on the trail of marihuana" since 1925, and had given more than 4000 lectures in forty states, and had personally uprooted and burned many thriving marihuana fields, in an earlier book titled Battling the Wolves of Society, which was published in 1929, Rowell included only one paragraph on marihuana and most of that was a quote from De Quincey s Confessions of an Opium Eater. 

De Quincey, T. Confessions of an Opium Eater. New York American Library, 1966. 

De Quincey (1822). Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Penguin English Library/Viking Press, New York. 

By 1830, Britain s dependence on opium was at its highest levels ever, with consumption reaching 22,000 pounds of opium in that year. The ethos of opium use in Britain over the course of the nineteenth century is illuminated in the writings of countless prominent literary figures. In 1819, poet John Keats was openly experimenting with opium as a recreational muse for his writings. In 1822, Thomas De Quincey published his now infamous Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, the most... 

Confessions of an English Opium Eater is a testament to opium s insatiable hold on its victims, even those with such great imaginative faculties ... 

In his famous Confessions of an English Opium Eater De Quincey (figure 14.1) is very clear on three important points. First, between 1804 and 1812 (when he used opium on a disciplined and regularly intermittent... 

SLW Baudelaire, Charles, Un Mangeur d opium avec le texte parallele des Confessions of an English Opium Eater et des Suspiria de profundis de Th. De Quincey, edition critique et commentee par Mich le Stauble-Lipman Wulf, Etudes Baudelairiennes VI-VII (Neuchatel La Baconniere, 1976). 

This is all the more obvious in the subtitle to Enchantements et tortures d un mangeur d opium in La Revue Contemporaine (Confessions of an English opium eater, being an extract from the life of a scholar, and Suspiria de profundis, being a sequel to the Confessions, by THOMAS DE QUINCEY ). 

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