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As one of the projects for a Public Speaking course taken during the summer after sophomore year of high school, I took up research on the then-controversial topic of psychotropic drugs in order to deliver a paper on the topic. My sources were every book I could find in the Maine South library on the subject and a number of articles found in my grandparents' copies of 'Time' and 'Life' magazines. I didn't know it at the time, but the conservative owners of Time-Life, the Luces, were themselves fans of psychedelic mushrooms and LSD. In any case, the articles about the psychedelics and about marihuana were almost entirely positive both in the scientific literature and in the popular press that I reviewed.

Consequently, I got interested in mind-altering chemicals, the safe ones, and started trying pot in the sophomore year. Nothing happened except coughing until I was given some which, unbeknownst to me, was dusted with heroin. That batch worked--tremendously. I learned what it was, but still finished the ounce I'd been given to take home before abandoning the opiates. One factor in this was reading Confessions of an English Opium-eater which vividly described both the positives and negatives of such drugs. Another factor was that it was illegal and expensive. A final, and probably most important, factor was that its effects, while orgasmically pleasurable, were trivial compared to the challenges posed by a later discovery: LSD--followed by mushrooms and peyote. Pleasure wasn't much of a draw for me, profound challenges were.

De Quincey's book is, by modern standards, over-written, his lavish descriptions growing tedious after a while.