The 19th-Century Book That Spawned the Opioid Crisis

The allure of the poppy. ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’ was the first modern drug memoir and set the tone for opium use for decades. Here, a field of Papaver somniferum (Opium poppy). Opium is extracted from the latex of the unripe seed pods. Ripe seeds are innocuous and widely used in baking. Javier Cañada/Unsplash

In 1804, a 19-year-old Oxford University undergraduate named Thomas De Quincey swallowed a prescribed dose of opium to relieve excruciating rheumatic pain. He was never the same.

“Oh! Heavens!” he wrote of the experience in the first modern drug memoir, “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater,” published in 1821. “What an upheaving, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit! What an apocalypse of the world within me!”