Of course, I look like crap. Do you know how much opium I've taken?

The Manchester-born author and intellectual Thomas De Quincey is most famous for his 1821 drug tell-all, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Like all people with a drug addiction, his life was not a happy one. The odd and depressive De Quincey had begun using opium at age 19 while he was in college. He was persuaded to later write about his lifelong addiction and the resulting book was a great success. But the writer was bad with money and remained half a step out of the debtor’s prison for a good part of his adult life. He died in 1859. An excerpt from the book from the section “The Pains of Opium”:

“It will occur to you often to ask, why did I not release myself from the horrors of opium by leaving it off or diminishing it? To this I must answer briefly: it might be supposed that I yielded to the fascinations of opium too easily; it cannot be supposed that any man can be charmed by its terrors. The reader may be sure, therefore, that I made attempts innumerable to reduce the quantity. I add, that those who witnessed the agonies of those attempts, and not myself, were the first to beg me to desist. But could not have I reduced it a drop a day, or, by adding water, have bisected or trisected a drop? A thousand drops bisected would thus have taken nearly six years to reduce, and that way would certainly not have answered. But this is a common mistake of those who know nothing of opium experimentally; I appeal to those who do, whether it is not always found that down to a certain point it can be reduced with ease and even pleasure, but that after that point further reduction causes intense suffering.”