In 1840, Elizabeth Barrett wrote to Robert Browing, asking: "Can
I be as good for you as morphine is for me, I wonder, even at
the cost of being as bad also?" Both solace and scourge, opium
has infiltrated our literary culture and history like no other
substance. In the 1660s, Thomas Sydenham created an opium
tincture. This purple syrup, laudanum, became the drug of choice
for Romantics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and George Crabbe.
Thomas de Quincey spoke of "an apocalypse of the world within
me". At the same time, the "lulling charities" of the poppy
could help to ease pain – like many tuberculosis sufferers,
Chopin passed away while sipping laudanum through a straw.
Modern palliative care could not exist without opiates, even
while soldiers decimate Afghan poppy fields. - Tell us what you
think: Star-rate and review this book The history of opium lives
between the intimately personal and the overtly political. The
debates that Thomas Dormandy charts with skill and sympathy
cannot be easily resolved. In