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Introduction One line (written most unwillingly) to ask you to forgive me if I am absent tomorrow night. My doctor is trying to break me of the habit of drinking laudanum. I am stabbed every night at ten with a sharp-pointed syringe which injects morphia under my skin— and gets me a night’s rest without any of the drawbacks of taking opium internally. If I only persevere with this, I am told I shall be able, before long, gradually to diminish the quantity of morphia and the number of nightly stabbings—and so emancipate myself from opium altogether. —Wilkie Collins (quoted in Gasson 2019) Nineteenth-century British novelist Wilkie Collins may be best known for the Victorian-era mystery The Woman in White, but what casual readers might not know is that he was intractably addicted to laudanum, a cocktail of opium and alcohol, which he used to treat his gout pain. In 1869, he described his addiction to laudanum, opium dissolved in alco- hol, in a letter to a friend from which the previous quotation comes. In an attempt to “emancipate” Collins from his addiction, Collins’s doctor began injecting him with morphine, a derivative of opium. While such a treatment (an opioid for an opioid addiction) might seem surprising to contemporary readers, at the time it was thought that injected drugs were safer and less addictive than those consumed by mouth. Not sur- prisingly, the doctor’s experiment failed, and Collins continued to drink laudanum, in increasingly large doses, for the rest of his life. Collins’s use of the word “emancipate” suggests that he felt shackled by his dependence on opium. Indeed, the word addiction comes from the Latin for “slavery,” and addiction can tyrannize an individual. Substance