ABSTRACT
Since De Quincey gave to the world his famous “Confessions,” people have been content to regard opium-eating as a strangely fascinating or as a strangely horrible vice. Most imagining that it transports to realms of ideal bliss unsurpassed by all that poet ever penned or dreamt—inducts into reveries that cast into the shade all the promises of an Oriental paradise; while all have undefined and undefinable conceptions regarding it. The mass of persons regard an opium-eater as at best but a mythical being. If they give him any corporeal existence at all, they think of him as they would of a human vampire, or some other creation bordering on the domains of the fabulous. To the opium-consumer, when deprived of the stimulant, there is nothing that life can bestow, not a blessing that man can receive, which would not come to him unheeded, undesired, and be a curse to him.
