Diary of a Drug Fiend

Au Pays de Cocaine 47 pocket. One sniff which gave us a sensation of the most exquisitely delicious wickedness, and we were on fourth speed again |! The only incident worth recording is the receipt of a letter and a box from Gretel Webster. The box con- tained a padded kimono for Lou, one of those gorgeous Japanese geisha silks, blue like a summer sky with dragons worked all over it in gold, with scarlet eyes and tongues. Lou looked more distractingly, deliriously glorious than ever. I had never been particularly keen on women. The few love affairs which had come my way had been rather silly and sordid. They had not revealed the possibilities of love ; in fact, I had thought it a somewhat overrated pleasure, a brief and brutal blindness with boredom and disgust hard on its heels. But with cocaine, things are absolutely different. I want to emphasise the fact that cocaine is in reality a local anesthetic. Thatis the actual explanation of its action. One cannot feel one’s body. (As every one knows, this is the purpose for which it is used in surgery and dentistry.) Now don’t imagine that this means that the physical pleasures of marriage are diminished, but they are utterly etherealised. The animal part of one is intensely stimulated so far as its own action is concerned; but the feeling that this passion is animal is completely transmuted. I come of a very refined race, keenly observant and easily nauseated. The little intimate incidents in- separable from love affairs, which in normal circum- stances tend to jar the delicacy of one’s sensibilities, do so no longer when one’s furnace is full of coke. Everything soever is transmuted as by “heavenly alchemy ” into a spiritual beatitude. One is intensely conscious of the body. But as the Buddhists tell us, the body is in reality an instrument of pain or dis- comfort. We have all of us a subconscious intuition