Opium Dens

Links to film extracts involving opium dens (to be taken with a pinch of salt)...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gwnw-lsyQYA&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqrBGk-Qrqo&feature=related


Shows exactly how to do opium...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdCExHcEUP8&feature=related


Opium pipes:
An opium pipe is a pipe designed for the vaporization and inhalation of opium. True opium pipes allow for the drug to be vaporized while being heated over a special oil lamp known as an opium lamp. It is thought that this manner of "smoking" opium began in the seventeenth century when a special pipe was developed that vaporized opium instead of burning it. [1]

The configuration of the typical opium pipe consists of a long stem, a ceramic pipe-bowl, and a metal fitting, known as the "saddle", through which the pipe-bowl plugs into the pipe-stem. The pipe-bowl must be detachable from the stem due to the necessity to remove the bowl and scrape its insides clean of opium ash after several pipes have been smoked. The stems of opium pipes were usually made from bamboo, but other materials were used such as ivory, silver and jade, to name a few. Pipe-bowls were typically some type of ceramic, including Yixing clay and blue and white porcelain. Sometimes opium pipe-bowls were carved from more valuable materials such as jade.

Because of its design, the opium pipe needed an opium lamp in order to function. The lamp was as highly specialized as the pipe, and was designed to channel just the right amount of heat upon the pipe-bowl so that the opium would vaporize and allow the smoker to inhale the intoxicating vapors.



Really good quote from the Sherlock Holmes story, The Sign of Four...
Holmes justifies his recourse to recreational drugs to Watson in these words: “I find it… so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action [i.e. whatever damage it might be doing him] is a matter of small moment… I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.”


Thomas De Quincey's descriptions of opium from his Confessions of an English Opium-eater...
The Pleasures
"Oh! just, subtle, and might opium! that to the hearts of poor and rich alike, for the wounds that will never heal, and for 'the pangs that tempt the spirit to rebel,' bringest an assuaging balm; eloquent opium! that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the purposes of wrath; and to the guilty man, for one night givest back the hopes of his youth, and hands washed pure of blood...."

De Quincey describes the long walks he took through the London streets under the drug's influence:
"Some of these rambles led me to great distances; for an opium-eater is too happy to observe the motions of time. And sometimes in my attempts to steer homewards, upon nautical principles, by fixing my eye on the pole-star, and seeking ambitiously for a north-west passage, instead of circumnavigating all the capes and headlands I had doubled in my outward voyage, I came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and such sphinx's riddles of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I conceive, baffle the audacity of porters, and confound the intellects of hackney-coachmen."

Hope this helps
Charlotte xx