In 1804, a 19-year-old Oxford University undergraduate named Thomas De Quincey swallowed a prescribed dose of opium to relieve excruciating rheumatic pain. He was never the same.
That the drug took away his physical pain was “a trifle,” De Quincey asserted, compared to “the immensity of those positive effects which had opened before me.”
Over the next eight years, De Quincey used opium to heighten his enjoyment of books, music, solitude, and urban wandering. In effect, he invented recreational drug taking.
Yet all the while, opium was tightening its grip on him, and in 1813 he succumbed to an addiction that tormented him until his death in 1859, more than half a century after he had first tampered with the drug.
And, as today’s opioid crisis makes clear, not millions of others who have followed him into addiction, and who have had their lives ravaged by the drug. De Quincey’s “Confessions” transformed perceptions of opium and mapped several crucial areas of drug experience that still provoke intense debate today.
The Oldest Drug
Opium is probably the oldest drug known to humankind. It is derived from the unripe seedpod of the poppy plant, Papaver somniferum. The ancient Greek poet Homer almost certainly refers to it as “a drug to quiet all pain and strife” in his epic poem “The Odyssey,” which was written in the eight or ninth century B.C., and which De Quincey quotes in his “Confessions.”
For thousands of years, opium was the principal analgesic known to medicine. In the 16th century, the German-Swiss alchemist Paracelsus described it as “a secret remedy.”
In early 19th-century Britain, opium was everywhere. People of every age and class used it for self-medication like we use aspirin today. It was legal. It was cheap. It was available in a wide range of cure-alls, including Godfrey’s Cordial, the Kendal Black Drop, and Mother Bailey’s Quieting Syrup.
Overprescribed
De Quincey consumed opium as “laudanum,” which is prepared by dissolving opium in alcohol. Morphine, the principal active agent in opium, was isolated in 1803 and delivered with a hypodermic syringe by the 1850s.At the beginning of the 20th century, opium was better known in the form of one of its chief derivatives: heroin. Today, opioids are sold in powerful prescription medications, including tramadol, methadone, and oxycodone. They are also, of course, widely available in illegal forms such as heroin, or in illicit forms of legal drugs—like fentanyl, a synthetic opioid.
De Quincey’s descriptions of his opium experience have thoroughly shaped modern perceptions of the drug, and in a variety of ways. He glamorized opium in his “Confessions,” linking it to spectacular dream sceneries, visionary forms of creativity, and intellectual, moral, and emotional bliss.
They were right to worry. Many 19th- and 20th-century addicts have said explicitly that De Quincey led them to the drug.
De Quincey was also the first to explore the painful cycles of intoxication, withdrawal, and relapse, and his accounts are deeply consonant with modern descriptions. Once he was habituated to opium, he no longer experienced anything like the euphoria he enjoyed as a recreational user.
When he determined to kick his habit, what he called “nervous misery” marked the beginning of withdrawal. If he attempted to battle through it, he was hit hard by vomiting, nausea, irritability, and depression. He often fought these miseries, too, but then his resolution faltered, and he went back to opium. His intake levels gradually climbed. He spiraled toward rock bottom. The grim cycle began again.
Myth Making
In one fundamental respect, however, De Quincey’s account of opioid addiction does not tally with today’s medical knowledge.By common consent, the pain of opioid withdrawal usually lasts about a week and is like having a very bad flu. De Quincey tells a different story. “Think of me as of one, even when four months had passed, still agitated, writhing, throbbing, palpitating, shattered,” he wrote.
De Quincey had a deeply paradoxical relationship with opium, and more than 30 years after his addiction had taken hold, he was the first to detail the sickening confusion that so many addicts have found at the crux of their drug experience.
Opium, he asserted, was a con that could convince long-term addicts that they could lay it aside easily and within a week.
Opium was a trade-off that defeated steady exertion, but that gave irregular bursts of energy. Opium was irresistible, like a celestial lover. And opium was a blight that withered life. The collision of these competing impulses made it difficult for De Quincey to see his addiction clearly, and impossible for him to surmount it.
“Since leaving off opium,” he once noted wryly, “I take a great deal too much of it for my health.”
De Quincey initiated the story of modern addiction. There were countless users and abusers before him, stretching back to the ancient world, but he was the first to publish a compelling narrative that explored the seductive pleasures and eviscerating pains of the drug.
He has been castigated for celebrating opium and for spreading misinformation about it. But in 1844, he was categorical about his drug abuse, and his harrowing words anticipate the testimonies of so many of the addicts caught up in today’s opioid crisis. “Not fear or terror,” De Quincey wrote, “but inexpressible misery, is the last portion of the opium-eater.”
