Kicking the Gong Around

[moon_custafer]

My brother posted this on Facebook, and I already shared it there, but thought it was interesting enough to link here: http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/journey-into-the-opium-underworld/

It's an interview with a historian/collector who became fascinated by opium-smoking paraphenalia and eventually took the habit up as research, because there are very few *accurate* depictions from the era (mostly just a lot of "and now our story takes us to an opium den, because EXOTIC! DECADENT!"). Short version -- it's harder (or it was for him) to become addicted to opium than to the more concentrated modern drugs, but once you are the withdrawal symptoms are hell.

He eventually gave it up, partly because a colleague and fellow-smoker died and her fate scared him; mainly because he realized he would have to sell his collection to make ends meet, and the antiques addiction was stronger than the drug addiction.

I like his comment that "All paraphernalia was made with lots of little facets and angles to reflect this lamp light. It all seems so magical. In fact, that’s the thing you really miss after you’ve quit smoking—the damn lamp, it’s just so beautiful."

ETA -- my comment to my brother was that most "opium addicts" in the Western world were probably laudanum addicts, and thinking about it, yeah -- even the ones like De Quincy or Coleridge were basically going, "Dude, this headache medicine -- I hear in China they smoke it for fun." "Cool, let's mix some of it with our tobacco and try!" "Dude!"

Comments

[bleodswean.livejournal.com]

Erm....laudanum is opium.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

I know laudanum is opium -- this collector in the article was specifically interested in opium as smoked in long pipes heated over a small oil lamp, which you see a lot in sensational fiction of the late 19th/early 20th century but which it turns out most Westerners didn't really know anything about -- it was just hearsay used for exotic effect. My comment was that most of the 19th-century English and American addicts I could name were in fact addicted to the painkiller, not the recreational substance -- i.e., they tended to not actually be frequenting opium dens.