Reading De Quincey Beyond Addiction: Opium, Suffering, and the Limits of the Disease Paradigm

What is it about?

This chapter shows how De Quincey’s Confessions became bound up with the modern belief that addiction is a disease, a view reinforced by late-Victorian fears about class, race, and national decline. By revisiting texts like “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” it traces how De Quincey was cast as a dangerous seducer whose opium visions threatened social order. The chapter then contrasts this with newer research, arguing that De Quincey’s distinctions between recreation, pain relief, and emotional trauma anticipate contemporary ideas about self-medication and offer a more nuanced understanding of drug use.

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Photo by Julian Rösner on Unsplash

Photo by Julian Rösner on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This article challenges long-standing assumptions about both De Quincey and the broader drug discourse of addiction. For more than a century, De Quincey’s Confessions has been (mis)read as a cautionary tale that illustrates the addictiveness of narcotics. By revisiting the Confessions alongside Conan Doyle’s “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” this article shows how De Quincey’s reputation as a dangerous “seducer” was constructed within a cultural moment saturated with anxieties about class, race, and imperial decline. The article demonstrates that De Quincey’s account anticipates central insights of the self-medication hypothesis and recent critiques of the disease paradigm. This shift in emphasis enables a more nuanced understanding of drug use—one that foregrounds context, trauma, and individual agency rather than assuming an inevitable slide into addiction.