Diary of a Drug Fiend

by Aleister Crowley

  “To begin with, you’ve been honest with yourselves; and that’s the thing that matters most. Then it’s a good sign again that the daily variation is as large as it is. I’d much rather see “two eighteen” than “eight eight” in spite of the four extra doses. And that for exactly the same reason as applies to the hourly distribution.

  “It’s the same with drink. The man who goes on the bust occasionally is very much easier to manage than the steady soaker. Every child in the Fourth Standard knows that. I believe it’s written in golden letters round the chancel in Westminster Abbey. If it isn’t, it ought to be.

  “Now don’t worry. And above all things, don’t get a fit of repentance and take too little today and tomorrow. If you do, you’ll have another relapse. I know it sounds as though I were contradicting myself. Make the most of it, I don’t care. I’m going to do it again in the following elegant manner.

  “I want you to get the whole subject of heroin out of your mind; and that is the reason why I insist so strongly on your keeping a record of every time you take it. It’s a psychological paradox that the best way to forget about a thing is to make a memorandum of it.

  “Now, goodbye, and come to dinner tonight at the studio. Perhaps you’ll feel like dancing.”

  He went off with an airy wave of the hand.

  When we came back from the dance the porter told us that a lady and gentleman had called to see us. They hadn’t left their names. They would call again in the morning.

  It struck me as curious; but I gave the matter little enough thought. The fact is that I was in rather a bad temper. I had used a good deal of heroin off and on during the last few days, and it had certainly not cost me anything to cut off the cocaine. Morphine and heroin give one a physical craving; but the pull of cocaine is principally moral and when one is taking H. one doesn’t care such a lot about taking it.

  But that night, raw as it was, I almost made up my mind to drive back and try to get a little snow for a change.

  We were getting over the heroin, the first stage of diminution, without too much suffering. But there was something exceedingly tedious about the process.

  We had had a very pleasant evening; but I couldn’t help comparing it with the same sort of thing in honeymoon days. The sparkle had gone out of the champagne of life.

  It was our fault of course, for trying to outwit nature. But at the same time, one couldn’t shut one’s eyes to the facts, and I knew Lamus would have had no hesitation in giving us a little snow, feeling the way I was.

  I don’t know why I felt such a disinclination to go back and ask him. It may have been the instinctive dislike of bothering him; and besides, it was rather humiliating to have to admit. There was also a trace of sturdy British feeling that the thing to do was to stick it out and trust a night’s rest to tone up my nerves.

  Lamus had advised us to take Turkish baths if we felt unduly depressed. We had found them very useful.

  We had got down to three goes a day two days running, chiefly by following his advice to take one of the white tablets instead of the heroin whenever the craving became irresistible. He made rather a point of that, by the way.

  It was a bad thing, he said, to yield to stress. It wasn’t nearly so harmful to take the heroin when one didn’t feel so badly in need of it.

  Even after all this time I hadn’t quite got onto the peculiarities of the man’s mind. I had never reached the stage where I could be sure what he could say next.

  One day we were talking about Lou’s Chinese appearance; and he said quite seriously that he must have some Chinese blood in him or was the reincarnation of a Chinese philosopher. Ko Yuen, I think he said the name was. He said that he owed it to his European reason to explain categorically why his thoughts had such an Asiatic cast.

  They certainly had. From our point of view it was simply perversity. And yet, as a rule, it seemed to work out all right in the end. But it gives one a pain in the neck to try to follow the way his mind works. And he takes a Satanic pleasure in taking hold of one’s most obviously reasonable ideas and putting up a series of paradoxes which bewilder one with their strangeness, yet to which there seems to be no answer.

  Yet in spite of all this subtlety he had a downright British doggedness; the most perverse train of reasoning would suddenly pull out into a bulldog kind of conclusion that would leave one wondering whether he had been really thinking at all on the lines he pretended.

  The upshot in my own case was to keep me up to the mark. So I went to bed, meaning to get up early and go to the Turker in the morning. But as it happened, we both slept late. By the time we were dressed we were getting hungry for lunch.

  I was annoyed at this. I had wanted to get out of the house and change my ideas as completely as possible. The Hot Room is an excellent place for the purpose. While I’m there, I find I can’t think of anything at all but the immediate effects of the temperature.

  I was annoyed, too, to find Lou comparatively cheerful. I decided I would go out after all and have lunch in the Cooling Room, when the porter called up to ask if we could see a lady and gentleman.

  These people had begun to obsess me. I demanded their names. There was a pause as if a discussion were taking place at the other end of the wire; and then he announced that it was Mrs. Webster and a friend.

  Why the mystery? I didn’t want to see her. What did she want with me? I had taken a strong dislike to the woman. I had come to blame her for putting us on to the drug business. It was so much easier than blaming myself.

  However, we couldn’t exactly refuse to see her, so I told the porter to show them up.

  “So it was you,” we both said in a breath as we advanced to meet each other. We were referring to the night of the suicide dinner at the Wisteria. As I was going out of the room I had thought I recognised her; but I had supposed she was out of London. She had been a couple of months before; but my mind had gotten into such a state that it never occurred to me that she might have come back.

  That’s the sort of thing that heroin does to one. One gets an idea about something, and it’s too much trouble to change it.

  She, on her side, had only half recognised me; and goodness knows she needed no excuse for that.

  “We heard you were in London,” she began volubly, in a tone which somehow rang false, “and of course I couldn’t rest till I had come and welcomed you and Lou in person. We heard you were in a little place in Greek Street from one of the crowd; but you had gone the very morning I called, and they told us you were ill and couldn’t see any one for a week. But Billy Bray and Lady Rhoda came in last night and said they’d seen you at a dance. So I wouldn’t waste a minute in coming to see you.”

  She rattled off all this as if she was in a violent hurry, punctuating her remarks by kissing Lou extravagantly.

  I could see that Lou resented the woman even more than I did, but she naturally took care not to show it.

  Hanging fatuously on the outskirts of the group was no less a person than the famous philanthropist, Jabez Platt. But he, too, had changed since we had seen him at the time of our marriage. Then he had been the very type of a smug, prosperous, contented Chadband; a placid patriarch with an air of disinterested benevolence and unassuming sanctity. If ever a man was at peace with himself and the world, it was Mr. Jabez Platt on the occasion of our first meeting.

  But today, he was a very different individual indeed. He seemed to have shrunk. His black clothes had fitted him like the skin of a well-­conditioned porpoise. Now they hung loosely like a toad’s. He resembled that animal in several other respects. The virtue had somehow gone out of him. There was a hungry, hunted look in his eyes. Of course, I could see instantly what was the matter with him; he had been taking heroin.

  “Dear me,” thought I, for my dislike for the creature was instinctive, “how are the mighty fallen!”

  Excuse a digression. There is a gr
eat deal of discussion about various pleasures – whether they are natural or unnatural. Lamus has since told me that the true test of the perversity of a pleasure is that it occupies a disproportionate amount of the attention.

  According to him, we have no right to decide off-hand that it is an unnatural pleasure to eat sawdust. A man might be constituted so that he liked it. And as long as his peculiarity doesn’t damage or interfere with other people, there’s no reason why he shouldn’t be left alone.

  But if it is the man’s fixed belief that sawdust eating is essential to human happiness; if he attributes almost everything that happens either to the effects of eating it or not eating it; if he imagines that most of the people he meets are also sawdust-eaters, and above all, if he thinks that the salvation of the world depends entirely upon making laws to compel people to eat sawdust, whether they like it or not, then it is fair to say that his mind is unbalanced on the subject; and that, further, the practice itself, however innocent it may appear, is in that particular case perverse. Sanity consists in the proper equilibrium of ideas in general. That is the only sense in which it is true that genius is connected with insanity.

  The conviction of Michael Angelo that his work was the most important thing in the Renaissance was not quite sane, even although in a way time has justified his belief.

  That is what is wrong with the majority of vaccinationists and anti-­vaccinationists and vegetarians and anarchists and the “irascible race of seers” in general, that they over-play their hands. However right they are in their belief, and in thinking that belief important, they are wrong in forgetting the equal or greater importance of other things. The really important things in the world are the huge silent inexorable things.

  “What are the wild waves saying?” – that the pull of the tides is gradually slowing down the earth’s rate of rotation. And that was what was wrong with me. I had a tendency to see heroin everywhere.

  That was not what was wrong with Mr. Jabez Platt!

  Gretel Webster was a mistress of the social arts, yet all her skill in small talk could not camouflage the artificial character of the visit. She saw it herself, and took advantage of the fact to ask Lou to take her in her bedroom and “talk clothes and leave dear Sir Peter and Mr. Platt to get better acquainted with each other”.

  But the process did not promise to be rapid. Dear Sir Peter and Mr. Platt seemed to have nothing to say to each other; dear Sir Peter did his best to offer cigars, cigarettes, and various drinks to relieve the tension, but Mr. Platt’s Roman virtue did not permit him to indulge in such things.

  Mr. Platt, however, was so sensible of the hospitality of dear Sir Peter that he felt obliged to ask dear Sir Peter’s opinion of – and he suddenly whipped a ten-gramme bottle of cocaine out of his coat-tail pocket.

  “We believe,” he said, “that this is a particularly pure sample. There is strong scientific reason to believe,” he explained, and the atmosphere of the pulpit positively radiated from him, “that it is not the drug itself but the impurities so often associated with it by careless manufacture that are responsible for the deplorable effects occasionally observed in persons who take it, whether for legitimate or other reasons.”

  To say that I sat stupefied is a gross understatement of the case. My astonishment prevented me recognising for a moment that my heart was bounding and leaping within me at the sight of the drug.

  “I should really value your opinion as a connoisseur,” continued Platt.

  There was something tremulous in his voice, as if he were keeping hold on himself by some incredible effort of will.

  I positively stammered.

  “Why, Mr. Platt,” I said, “I thought you were so anxious to stop the use of the drug altogether. I thought it was you who were chiefly responsible for putting through the Diabolical Dope Act.”

  “Ignorance, pure ignorance, my dear Sir Peter,” he cried. “We live and learn, we live and learn. Used in moderation, we find it to be positively wholesome. A stimulant no doubt, you will say. And all stimulants may undoubtedly be dangerous. But I’m afraid people will have them, and surely the wisest course is to see that what they have is as little deleterious as possible.”

  While he spoke he kept on nervously jerking the bottle in my direction as if afraid to put it into my hands outright. And then I realised how very badly I wanted it.

  “Well, certainly, Mr. Platt,” I replied, entering into the spirit of the thing, “I shall be only too glad to give you my opinion for what it may be worth.”

  I could not conceal the feverish eagerness with which I shook out a dose. My pretence at sniffing with a critical air was ludicrously feeble. A child could have seen that I was shaken, body and soul, by the feverish lust to get it into my system after so long an abstinence.

  Time had purged my system of the poison. It found the house “empty and swept and garnished”; and seven devils entered into me instead of the ejected one. My malaise passed like a cloud swept by the wind from the face of the sun. I became physically buoyant as I had not been for months. I was filled with superb self-confidence. My hesitation vanished. I played the game with all the sublime intoxication of recovered divinity.

  “I must admit that it seems to me excellent,” I pronounced with lofty calm, though my blood was singing in my ear.

  I handed back the bottle.

  “Keep it, I beg of you, my dear Sir Peter,” protested Platt enthusiastic­ally. “One never knows when a little household medicine may not come in handy.”

  Something set me off into roars of internal laughter. I couldn’t see the joke, but it was the biggest joke in the world.

  “It’s really awfully kind of you, my dear Mr. Platt,” I said with unction, feeling that I was cast for the star part in some stupendous comedy.

  “The obligation is entirely on my side,” returned my guest. “You have no idea how your kind approval has set my mind at ease.”

  I took another sniff. I was fainting away into an inexpressible ecstasy. I re-corked the bottle and put it in my pocket, thanking Platt profusely.

  “I can’t imagine your mind being ill at ease,” I went on with a note of irony, which was, however, absolutely genial. I was friends with every one in the world. “If there was ever a man with a conscience void of offence toward God and man, that man is surely Jabez Platt.”

  “Ah, conscience, conscience,” he sighed. “You have no idea, Sir Peter, how it has tormented me of late. The moral responsibility, the appalling moral responsibility.”

  “Whatever it is,” I answered, “you are certainly the right man to shoulder it.”

  “Well,” he said, “I think I may say without boasting that I trust I have never tried to shirk it. Your approval has absolved me of the last shred of hesitation. I must explain, my dear Sir Peter, that I have always been a poor man. The service of humanity demands many sacrifices from its devotees, and I assure you that in that bottle there lies not only, as I now feel assured, the salvation of mankind from one of its direst dangers, but an enormous fortune.”

  He leant forward and tapped my knee with his forefinger.

  “An enormous fortune,” he repeated in awed tones. And then lowering his voice still further, “Enough, more than enough, for both of us.”

  “Why, how do I come in?” I asked in surprise, while a little thrill of avarice tickled my heart-strings.

  I reflected that what with one thing or another, I had made a dis­agreeably large hole in my capital. Only two mornings ago I had had a rather irritating letter from Mr. Wolfe on the subject. It would suit me perfectly well to make an enormous fortune.

  He drew his chair closer to mine, and began to talk in a quiet, persuasive voice. “It’s this way, my dear Sir Peter. The workings of Providence are indeed strange. just before the passing of my Act, I had invested what little fortune I possessed in the purchase of a Cocaine Factory in Switzerland, with the inte
ntion of putting an end to its nefarious activities. Now here is an instance of what I can only refer to with reverent gratitude as the Moving of the Divine Finger. On the one hand, my chemical manager informed me of the marvellous scientific discovery which I have already mentioned – I am sure you feel no ill effects from what you have taken?” His voice took on a tone of grave concern, almost paternal.

  “Not much,” I countered cheerfully, “It’s splendid. I can do with another sniff right now!” I suited the action to the words, like Hamlet’s ideal mummer.

  “Won’t you be persuaded?” I queried maliciously.

  “Ah, no, I thank you, dear Sir Peter! Your remarks have raised me to the highest pinnacle of happiness.”

  I took a fourth dose, just for luck.

  “Well, on the other hand, I discovered that, thanks to the very Act which I had so arduously laboured to put upon the Statute Book, that little bottle of yours which costs me less than five shillings to manufacture, and was sold retail for a matter of fifteen shillings, can now be sold – discreetly, you understand – in the West End for almost anything one cares to ask – ten, twenty, even fifty pounds to the right customer. Eh? What do you say to that?” He laughed gleefully. “Why, ill-natured people might say I had put through the Act for the very purpose of making a bull market for my produce!”

  “And you save humanity from its follies and vices at the same stroke!” The cocaine had cleared my mind – it was like one of those transparent golden sunsets after a thunderstorm in the Mediterranean. I revelled in the ingenuity of Mr. Platt’s proceedings. I gloated with devilish intensity upon the jest of carrying out so magnificent a scheme beneath so complete a camouflage. It was the vision of Satan disguised as an angel of light.

  “Yes, indeed, the whole affair is eminently gratifying from every point of view,” answered Platt. “Never in all my life have I been permitted to see with such luminous clarity the designs of providential loving-kindness.”