At the beginning of the 19th century, opium influenced not only the policy of trading empires in the Far East, but also, quite unexpectedly, the

The analytical and psychological interest of people like De Quincey and the French psychiatrist J.-J. Moreau de Tours, and their relationship to the substances that

Morphine was isolated in 1805 by the young German chemist Friedrich Serturner. For Serturnera, morphine was the purest essence of a poppy plant. He gave

Purified alcohol and white sugar preceded morphine as addictive samples of high-purity compounds, but morphine became an example of modern “strong agents”, that is, injected

Like heroin, cocaine is a modern drug of high purity, isolated from a plant with a long history of traditional consumption. For millennia, the inhabitants of

Not all literary mentions of cocaine portrayed him in such a terrible light. In 1888, the British physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote his now famous

At the beginning of this century, racists in the United States, spreading all kinds of nonsense, stubbornly instilled fears that blacks of the South, mad

The involvement of governments in drug trafficking and their direct responsibility for this will decrease under the cover of fraudulent enterprises, replacing direct profits, while

The seriousness of addiction to synthetic drugs such as heroin and cocaine could not long remain unknown to the heirs of the slave trade and

In his fantastic story “The Man in the High Castle” Philip K. Dick presented a kind of alternative world in which the Japanese and the Third Reich