High Society: Mind‐altering drugs in history and culture

Abstract

Khan (published in 1816), which he claimed to have written after an opium-induced dream. Set against this is Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an Opium Eater, which dwells more on the pain than the pleasures resulting from laudanum use. Baudelaire's observation in Les Paradis Artificiels is perhaps one that substance use workers can easily identify with. He was considering the use of hashish and opium as aids to poetic creativity: 'Even if one can say that they heighten the senses they so stifle the will that one is incapable of any daily routine.'