Seeing More Clearly in the Dark
Thomas de Quincey ate and drank a lot of opium.
He started in 1804, while a student at Oxford. By 1812, he had become an addict. By 1821, he’d eaten enough opium to kill Iggy Pop and wrote Confessions of an English Opium Eater, inaugurating the tradition of addiction literature.
Despite the success of Confessions, he struggled fin…
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