What I'd heard is that he developed a drug regimen, more than an uncontrolled habit. I saw an interview of him once where he said he didn't do cocaine because he hated a drug that makes your hands shake.

Burroughs was a junky for about two years, not a `lifer' as is often assumed. He then had intermitten relapses, but all in all, a fairly normal experience for someone who gets wired and then wants out.

What does "very clinical" mean? He wrote a book _Junkie_ about being a junkie.

Interesting. I've heard that Burroughs' heroin habit was very clinical, that he never really became a "junkie," which was why he lived as long as he did.

"Nodier was a Romantic for whom life was a voyage of introspective self-discovery, and he convinced himself that opium gave him revelations that he could not obtain when sober."

Convinced himself because it was true, I guess. The early stages of opium addiction really helps with creativity - though long-term use results in the opposite. This is one theory as to why Wilkie Collins' _The Moonstone_ was so imaginative, while his later novels kind of fall apart. (Collins did not even recognize the ending of the Moonstone as his own).

I once wrote a paper about opium and British literature/society. Some facts: In 1860, Britain imported more than 88,000 pounds of it to cure depression, fatigue, insanity, pneumonia, hysteria, hangovers, menstrual cramps, motion sickness, etc etc. Opium was contained in such medicines for kids as "Mother Bailey's Quieting Syrup." (many babies died as a result) You could procure opium from a grocer, baker, and tailor, to name a few. It was often used as a cheap substitute for alcohol.

Anyone interested in reading more about opium and literature should pick up Barry Milligan's _Pleasures and Pains Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-Century British Culture_ and Alethea Hayter's _Opium and the Romantic Imagination_

What I don't entirely get is Ginsberg's segue from masturbation to drug culture. Are drugs more socially acceptable than sex? The answer is obvious, I guess.

Well, without them, we wouldn't have "Prozac Nation."

This was interesting. I've read a bit about painters and drugs, van Gogh's absinthe habit, for example, or Francis Bacon's proclivity for drink (an understatement?). But I've not read much about writers and drug-use, except for the old cliches of alcoholic poets and novelists.

I wonder if, in the decades to come, journalists and academics will be writing articles about how the introduction of anti-depressants have affected the arts.

"Allen Ginsberg started experiencing ecstatic religious visions while masturbating"

Well, isn't that the point?



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