Ergebnis für "On Opium Pain, Pleasure, and Other Matters of Substance" in Alle Kategorien

North Americans are the world’s most prolific users of opioid painkillers. In On Opium, Zwarenstein describes her own use of opioid-inspired medicines to cope with a painful disease. Evoking both Thomas De Quincey and Frida Kahlo, she travels from the decadence of recreational drug use in past eras to the misery and privation of the overdose crisis today. Speaking with users of prescribed morphine, illicit fentanyl, and smoked opium, Zwarenstein investigates uncomfortable questions about why people use substances and when substance use becomes addiction.

New York City, 1899. Tillie Pembroke’s sister lies dead, her body drained of blood and with two puncture wounds on her neck. Bram Stoker’s new novel, Dracula, has just been published, and Tillie’s imagination leaps to the impossible: the murderer is a vampire. But it can’t be - can it? A ravenous reader and researcher, Tillie has something of an addiction to truth, and she won’t rest until she unravels the mystery of her sister’s death.

Der Gegenstand der Betrachtung und empirischen Analyse auf Basis jahrzehntelanger eigener Erfahrung ist das Opium. Der britische Schriftsteller Thomas de Quincey schildert Höhen und Tiefen der intensiven Beziehung zu seinem langzeitigen Lebensgefährten Brown Sugar. Seine Bekenntnisse eines englischen Opiumessers stellen keine Verherrlichung harter Drogen dar, sondern können auch heute noch als Anregung für eine vorurteilsfreie Debatte im staatlichen Umgang mit legalen und illegalen Rauschmitteln dienen.

Graham Cluskey ermittelt im Fall des Massakers am englischen Königshof. Wer auch immer für die Tat verantwortlich ist: Er zieht im Hintergrund die Fäden und vernichtet alle Spuren. Endlich liefert der persische Alchimist Mahmud ibn Arabi den entscheidenden Hinweis: Opium! Doch erst ein schrecklicher Vorfall stößt Cluskey auf Londons Unterwelt, eine Welt dunkler Rituale und geheimer Kultstätten... und auf einen Plan, der viel perfider ist, als Cluskey je befürchtet hat!

Thomas De Quincey's highly charged and hauntingly accurate account of laudanum addiction is considered the root of all drug novels. From Baudelaire to Burroughs, Confessions of an English Opium Eater paved the way for later generations of writers. Initially prescribed as pain relief for a chronic condition, De Quincey soon found himself compelled by the opium experience.

A “memorable series of portraits of the working class people who defended Tiananmen Square” (The New York Review of Books) during the protests from the award-winning poet, dissident, and “one of the most original and remarkable Chinese writers of our time” (Philip Gourevitch). Much has...

Violent confrontation between armed groups over the supply of illegal narcotics is something we commonly associate with criminal gangs in modern cities, but in the mid-19th century Great Britain went to war with Imperial China in order to continue to supply Chinese addicts with opium. The two wars that followed have become known as the Opium Wars, and they led to the utter defeat of China, the establishment of a British colony in Hong Kong, and the continuation of a narcotics trade that was worth millions of pounds each year to the British.