Diary of a Drug Fiend

CHAPTER VII THE WINGS OF THE OOF-BIRD THE lunch at the Restaurant de la Cascade was like a lunch in a dream. We seemed to be aware of what we were eating without actually tasting it. As I think I said before, it’s the anesthesia of cocaine that deter- mines the phenomena. When I make a remark like that, I understand that it’s the dead and gone medical student popping up. But never you mind that. The point is that when you have the right amount of snow in you, you can't feel anything in the ordinary sense of the word. You appreciate it in a sort of impersonal way. There’s a pain, but the pain doesn’t hurt. You enjoy the fact of the pain as you enjoy reading about all sorts of terrible things in history at school. But the trouble about cocaine is this; that it’s almost impossible to take it in moderation as almost any one, except an American, can take whisky. Every dose makes you better and better. It destroys one’s power of calculation. We had already discovered the fact when we found that the supply we had got from Gretel, with the idea that it would last almost indefinitely, was running very short, when the dressing-gown came to solve the problem. We had only been a few days on the stunt, and what we had got from three or four sniffs, to begin with, meant almost perpetual stoking to carry on. However, that didn’t matter, because we had an ample supply. There must have been a couple of kilograms of either C. or H. in that kimono. And when you think that an eighth of a grain is rather a big dose of H., you can easily ; 95