These decadent cultural images are familiar, but what is the story behind them? • Coleridge and de Quincey swilling laudanum • Sigmund Freud and
Sherlock Holmes dallying with cocaine • Baudelaire and Gautier rapt in hashish fantasies • Queen Victoria with her prescription of cannabis How did cannabis and cocaine, opium and ether, mushrooms and mescaline enter the worlds of
nineteenth century Britain, Europe and America-and what was their impact on that century's dreams and
nightmares?
Many people think that drugs are a new thing, which the hippies in San Francisco in the 1960s more or less introduced drugs to the West, and that people "in the good old days" never dealt with drugs…
