The Pains of Opium, and the Case That Had None

In the autumn of 1804, Thomas De Quincey, nineteen years old and already a runaway from his own school, walked into a chemist’s shop on Oxford Street in London on a rainy Sunday afternoon and bought laudanum for what he called rheumatic pains in his head and face. He expected relief and got it. He also got a pleasure he had not been looking for, and over the next eight years he went back to it on and off, until, by his own dating, it became a habit he could not leave.

He turned the whole arc into a book. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater ran in the London Magazine in 1821 and appeared as a volume the next year, divided into sections whose titles De Quincey chose: “The Pleasures of Opium,” covering the years up to 1812, and “The Pains of Opium,” which begins in 1813 and does not let up. The pains get the more detailed treatment. There is insomnia, there are nightmares that rebuild themselves each night into something worse, and there are attempts to cut the dose, each followed by suffering described closely enough that a reader believes it.

The structure of that book, a wanting on one level and a wish to be rid of the wanting on another, matches a case the philosopher Harry Frankfurt described in 1971, in a paper that never mentions De Quincey. In “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” Frankfurt separated a first-order desire, wanting the drug, from a second-order desire, wanting not to want it. A person who has both and keeps losing the second to the first is what Frankfurt called the unwilling addict. His will is not free, because the desire that moves him is one he does not endorse. De Quincey’s book lays out that structure without any interpretation added. He gave the wish to quit its own section, under its own title, a century and a half before Frankfurt had a name for it.

Frankfurt described a second case, cited much less often. The behavior is the same, daily use and real physical dependence, but the inner division is missing. This person does not want to want otherwise. Frankfurt’s verdict on him is careful. His will is not free either, since he could not stop if he tried. But he takes the drug of his own free will, because the desire that moves him is the one he wants to have, and he is responsible for taking it. Frankfurt left this willing addict as a thought experiment. Something close to a documented case exists.

On February 27, 1977, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police raided Keith Richards’s suite at the Harbour Castle Hotel in Toronto and found twenty-two grams of heroin. According to Rolling Stone’s report of the case, Richards told the officers the drugs were his and that he had been addicted for the previous four years. When he wrote about those years in his memoir Life (2010), there was no shame in it. He called heroin “a seductress.” He claimed he had avoided the rock-star early death because he used only “the finest, finest cocaine and the purest, purest heroin.” The book describes the drug with relish, not as a long fight he kept losing.

From the outside, the two men would have looked alike: daily users, physically dependent, still working. De Quincey wrote and published through most of his addiction. Richards recorded and toured through most of his. Nothing in either man’s visible routine would have told an observer which one, on Frankfurt’s account, had a divided will. The difference shows up only in what each later wrote, and only because each was unusually clear about which experience he had lived.

The philosopher Gary Watson pressed on Frankfurt’s framework in a 1975 paper, “Free Agency.” Watson asked why the second-order desire should be treated as the real self. Nothing guarantees that the wanting-to-want comes any less from outside the person than the desire it judges, and if a higher level is needed to settle which level counts, the regress has no end. The hierarchy does not settle whether the will is free. It moves the question up a floor.

Applied to these two men, Watson’s point cuts both ways. De Quincey’s shame came wrapped in the language of a pious England that had already decided what opium-eating said about a man’s character. Richards’s lack of shame was formed inside a scene built to treat that use as ordinary. Neither man’s attitude toward his own habit came from nowhere.

What survives Watson is a narrower claim. Neither man’s higher-order attitude has to be his truer self, untouched by culture. It is enough that the two books record two different inner states, whatever produced them: one a repeated, losing fight, the other the absence of one.

De Quincey died in 1859, still taking laudanum in reduced doses after four decades of describing a struggle he never won. Richards stopped using heroin in 1979, after a Canadian court sentenced him to probation and ordered him to keep up treatment; in Life he credits his manager Jane Rose with getting him through the withdrawal. Even the ending, in his telling, came from outside rather than from a will finally winning a war with itself. Frankfurt never claimed the willing addict was admirable or the unwilling one weak. His claim was narrower and stranger: a chain no one is pulling against is a different thing from a chain still being pulled, even when, from the next room, both look like someone standing still.