Opium – the Diary of his cure – Jean Cocteau
Picasso used to say to me the smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world

Opium – the Diary of his cure – Jean Cocteau
 I would add that opium is the opposite of the Pravaz syringe.  It reassures.  It reassures by reason of its luxury, its rites, the ant-medical elegance of its lamps, furnaces, pipes and the age old perfection of this exquisite poisoning......

 

It is rare for an addict to forsake opium.  Opium forsakes him, ruining everything.  It is a substance which escapes analysis – living capricious, capable of turning suddenly against the smoker.  It is the barometer of a diseased sensibility.  At times when the weather is humid, the pipe drips.  If an addict goes to the seaside, the drug swells and refuses to burn.  The approach of snow, a storm or the mistral, destroys its efficacy.  Some noisy surroundings can take away all its virtues.
In short there is no mistress more exacting than this drug which takes jealousy to the point of emasculating the addict....
If he takes care of himself, an addict who inhales twelve pipes a day all his life will not only be fortified against influenza, colds and sore throats, but will also be far less in danger than a man who drinks a glass of brandy or who smokes four cigars.  I know people who have smoked one, three, seven, up to twelve pipes a day for forty years........

 

Addiction ruins the liver, affects the nervous cells, causes constipation, makes the temples like parchment and contracts the iris of the eye.  Habit is a rhythm, a singular hunger which can upset the addict, but causes him no harm. 

The symptoms of the craving are of so strange a kind that they cannot be described............ imagine that the earth is turning a little less fast, that the moon is coming a little closer....

Like love, like seasickness, the craving penetrates everywhere.  Resistance is useless.  At first a malaise, then things become worse.  Imagine a silence equivalent to the crying of thousands of children whose mothers do not return to give them the breast.  The lover's anxiety transposed into nervous awareness. 

An absence which dominates, a negative despotism.

 

The phenomena become clearer.  Flashes like moire before the eyes, champagne in the veins, frozen siphons, cramps, sweating at the root of the hair, dryness in the mouth, sniffling, tears.  Do not persist.  Your courage is to no  purpose.  If you delay too long, you will no longer be able to take your equipment and roll your pipe.  Smoke.  Your body was waiting for only a sign.  One pipe is enough. 

It is easy to say; 'Opium arrests life, anaesthetises.  Well-being comes from a kind of death'.  Without opium I am cold, I catch cold.  I do not feel hungry.  I am impatient to impose what I invent.  When I smoke, I am warm, I do not know what colds are, I am hungry, my impatience disappears. 
Doctors, reflect on this riddle! 

 

Opium – the Diary of his cure – Jean Cocteau
Clinics receive few opium addicts.  It is rare for an opium addict to stop smoking...Of all drugs, 'the drug' is the most subtle. 

The lungs absorb its smoke instantaneously.  The effect of a pipe is immediate.  I am speaking of the real smokers. 

The amateurs feel nothing, they wait for dreams and risk being seasick; because the effectiveness of opium is the result of a pact.  If we fall under its spell, we shall never be able to give it up. To moralise to an opium addict is like saying to Tristan: 'Kill Yseult.  You will feel much better afterwards'.

 

Opium lightens the mind.  It never makes one witty.  It spreads the mind out.  It does not gather it up into a point.

To say of an addict who is in a continual state of euphoria that he is degrading himself is like saying of marble that it is spoilt by Michelangelo, of canvas that it is stained by Raphael, of paper that it is soiled by Shakespeare, of silence that it is broken by Bach.