Free Opium by Martin Booth

wrote again to his brother, saying: ‘Laudanum gave me repose, not sleep; but you, I believe, know how divine that repose is, what a spot of enchantment, a green spot of fountains and flowers and trees in the very heart of a waste of sands.’
    It was not until the winter of 1800, when Coleridge started taking laudanum and brandy to conquer acute back pain and swellings in his joints, that he became unequivocally addicted. By early 1802, he was taking over 100 drops of laudanum a day, a dosage he reduced by the following winter to 12–20 per day to combat nightmares and severe diarrhoea which, unbeknownst to him, were caused by his withdrawal. In April 1804, aware he was addicted, Coleridge took a voyage to Malta to break his habit. He failed.
    Like most addicts, Coleridge moved in drug-taking circles, one of the characters he was familiar with being Dr Thomas Beddoes, who was at the centre of a group of drug experimentalists. Beddoes, who lived in Bristol, was a physician for whom drugs were not only a professional interest but a hedonistic one. His ‘study’ of drugs was not restricted to opiates: he was, in modern terminology, into the whole scene. In his Pneumatic Institution, a clinic he ran for pulmonary diseases, Beddoes toyed with opiates, cannabis and a wide range of other substances. It was here Sir Humphrey Davy first discovered nitrous oxide, or ‘laughing gas’, which he and others – Coleridge included – found amusing.
    An example of Beddoes’s intense drug involvement is revealed in a letter he wrote to his friend, Thomas Wedgwood: ‘We will have a fair trial of Bang [a misspelling for bhang, or cannabis] – Do bring down some of the Hyocyamine Pills – and I will give a fair trial of opium, Hensbane, and Nepenthe. By the bye, I always considered Homer’s account of the Nepenthe as a Banging lie.’
    Coleridge, unlike many, made little effort to hide his addiction: he admitted to it openly. His friends William Wordsworth, Robert Southey and William Cottle were aware of his entrapment, the cause of his frequently sallow complexion, dull eyes and shaking hands. De Quincey recorded Coleridge at a lecture:
    His appearance was generally that of a person struggling with pain and overmastering illness. His lips were baked with feverish heat, and often black in colour; and in spite of the water which he was continually drinking through the whole course of his lecture, he often seemed to labour under an almost paralytic inability to raise the upper jaw from the lower. In such a state it is clear that nothing could save the lecture itself from reflecting his own feebleness and exhaustion, except the advantage of having been precomposed in some happier mood.
    As lecturing was an important part of Coleridge’s livelihood, and as his addiction frequently meant cancellation of a lecture at the very last minute, with audiences waiting at the door, the effect on his income can be guessed and he lived much of his life at least partly supported by friends.
    At times, Coleridge was deeply ashamed of his habituation, vehemently deploring it although he did not feel guilty and often dismissed it by blaming it on his weak health. He even claimed opium was essential to his earning a living, yet he was desperate to be rid of it, as De Quincey observed:
    Grave, indeed, he continued to be, and at times absorbed in gloom; nor did I ever see him in a state of perfectly natural cheerfulness. But as he strove in vain, for many years, to wean himself from his captivity to opium, a healthy state of spirits could not be much expected. Perhaps, indeed [he went on, recognising the effects of habituation upon both Coleridge’s physical and mental well-being], where the liver and other organs had, for so large a period in life, been subject to a continual morbid stimulation, it may be impossible for the system ever to recover a natural action. Torpor, I suppose, must result from