SERIES: DRUGS UNCOVERED: DRUGS IN LITERATURE: A BRIEF HISTORY

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Opium

The Romantic poet composed one of his most famous works after taking
laudanum in 1797. After waking from a stupor in which he'd dreamed of
the stately pleasure-domes of a Chinese emperor, he scribbled 'Kubla
Khan'. Coleridge's addiction finally killed him in 1834.

Thomas De Quincey, Laudanum

His autobiographical account of his addiction to opium, Confessions of
an English Opium Eater, published in 1821, brought him almost
overnight fame. The book set the template for many writers who
attempted to follow in De Quincey's druggy footsteps and found an even
wider audience when Baudelaire published a French translation in 1860
called Les paradis artificiels.

Charles Baudelaire, Hashish

Baudelaire was a member of the Club de Hachichins (Hashish Club),
which met between 1844 and 1849 and counted Alexandre Dumas and Eugene
Delacroix among its numbers. Baudelaire wrote widely on hash, saying:
'Among the drugs most efficient in creating what I call the artificial
ideal... the most convenient and the most handy are hashish and opium.'

Robert Louis Stevenson, Cocaine

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) was written during a
six-day cocaine binge. His wife Fanny said: 'That an invalid in my
husband's condition of health should have been able to perform the
manual labour alone of putting 60,000 words on paper in six days,
seems almost incredible.'

Aldous Huxley, Mescaline

In The Doors of Perception, his famous 1954 book, which inspired Jim
Morrison's choice of band name, Huxley recounts at length his
experience on the drug mescaline. Found naturally in the Peyote
cactus, mescaline induces hallucinations and it is these Huxley found
opened his mind and inspired him to write his book.

Jack Kerouac, Benzedrine

The Beat writer took less than three weeks to pen On the Road (1957).
However, it took him a further five years to edit it for
publication.

William Burroughs, Heroin

The other famed Beat writer drew on his experience of addiction
throughout his writing, most notably in Junkie (1953) and Naked Lunch
(1959). The latter was written in Tangier, Morocco under the influence
of marijuana and an opioid called Eukodol.

Philip K Dick, Speed

The great sci-fi writer's intensive use of speed and hallucinogens
inspired much of his work. One particular drug, Semoxydrine - similar
to speed - fuelled him in the manic production of 11 sci-fi novels,
some essays and short stories all in the space of one year between
1963 and 1964.

Hunter S Thompson, Everything

Thompson, pictured right, wrote the infamous 1972 book Fear and
Loathing in Las Vegas, about a road-trip he had taken in 1971. His
alter-ego narrator sets out with 'two bags of grass, 75 pellets of
mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker
half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers,
downers, screamers, laughers'.

Stephen King, Cocaine

The great horror writer was addicted to cocaine between 1979 and 1987
and used it to create a buzz to write. 'With cocaine, one snort, and
it just owned me body and soul,' he told The Observer in 2000.