Diary of a Drug Fiend

Au Pays de Cocaine 57 guessed we might get tired of coco, ‘grateful and com- forting’ as it is. So the dear old thing sent us some heroin. And there are still some people who tell us that life is not worth living!” “Ever try it?’’ 1 asked, and delayed the answer with a kiss. | When the worst was over, she told me that she had only taken it once, and then, in a very minute dose, which had had no effect on her as far as she knew. “That’s all right,” I said, from the height of my superior knowledge. “It’s all a question of estimating the physiological dose. It’s very fine indeed. The stimulation is very much better than that of morphine. One gets the same intense beatific calm, but without the languor. Why, Lou, darling, you’ve read De Quincey and all those people about opium, haven't you? Opium’s a mixture, you know—something like twenty different alkaloids in it. Laudanum: Coleridge took it, and Clive—all sorts of important people. It’s a solution of opium in alcohol. But morphia is the most active and important of the principles in opium. You could take it in all sorts of ways. Injection gives the best results ; but it’s rather a nuisance, and there’s always danger of getting dirt in. You have to look out for blood-poisoning aH the time. It stimulates the imagination marvellously. It kills all pain and worry like a charm. But at the very moment when you have the most gorgeous ideas, when you build golden palaces of what you are going to do, you have a feeling at the same time that nothing is really worth doing, and that itself gives you a feeling of terrific superiority to every- thing else in the world. And so, from the objective point of view, it comes to nothing. But heroin does all that morphia does. It’s a derivative of morphia, you know—Diacetyl-Morphine is the technical name. Only instead of bathing you in philosophical inertia, you are as keen as mustard on carrying out your ideas, I’ve never taken any myself. I suppose we might as well start now.”