Black Opium

About the Author

Claude Farrere, a pseudonym of Frederic-Charles Bargone (18761957), was the author of several sensational novels set in exotic locations like Istanbul, Saigon, and Nagasaki. Known as a "grand connoisseur" of opium smoking who sometimes puffed down twenty to thirty pipes in a session, Farrere introduced his contemporary French literati, artists, and musicians to the pleasures of fume d'opium. Farrere, a large man, is reputed to have smoked his own weight in opium during his life. He enjoyed "pipes" until his death at ninety years old.

Pierre Lous, (18701925) was a French poet and writer, most renowned for lesbian and classical themes. He is known as seeking to express pagan sensuality with stylistic perfection.

Michael Horowitz is Timothy Leary's archivist and actress Winona Ryder's father. (Tim is Ryder's God-father). He founded the Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library,the largest library of drug literature. It is rumored that Horowitz and actor Leonardo DiCaprio are planning a "biopic" - biographical movie - about Leary to be written by Craig Lucas.

Francis Moraes, PhD, a research physicist and chemist, was a physics professor at Portland State University in Portland,Oregon where he studied the heroin subculture. He is author of Heroin User's Handbook, and Little Book of Heroin and was a philosophy professor at University of Oregon.

Alexander King was a story illustrator, figure painter and author with an eye-brow raising lifestyle. Time magazine described him as "an ex-illustrator, ex-cartoonist, ex-adman, ex-editor, ex-playwright, ex-dope addict. For a quarter-century he was an ex-painter, and by his own bizarre account qualifies as an ex-midwife. He is also an ex-husband to three wives and an ex-Viennese of sufficient age (60) to remember mutton-chopped Emperor Franz Joseph. When doctors told him a few years ago that he might soon be an ex-patient (two strokes, serious kidney disease, peptic ulcer, high blood pressure), he sat down to tell gay stories of the life of all these earlier Kings."