A book is open in front of me and this is what it has today about the symptoms of morphine withdrawal:'... morbid anxiety, a nervous depressed condition, irritability, weakening of the memory, occasional hallucinations and a mild impairment of consciousness...' I have not experienced any hallucinations, but I can only say that the rest of this description is dull, pedestrian and totally inadequate.' Depressed condition' indeed! Having suffered from this appalling malady, I hereby enjoin all doctors to be more compassionate toward their patients. What overtakes the addict deprived of morphine for a mere hour or two is not a 'depressed condition': it is slow death. Air is insubstantial, gulping it down is useless... there is not a cell in one's body that does not crave... but crave what? This is something which defies analysis and explanation. In short, the individual ceases to exist:he is eliminated. The body which moves, agonizes and suffers is a corpse. It wants nothing, can think of nothing but morphine. To die of thirst is a heavenly, blissful death compared with the craving for morphine. The feeling must be something like that of a man buried alive, clawing at the skin on his chest in the effort to catch the last tiny bubbles of air in his coffin, or of a heretic at the stake, groaning and writhing as the first tongues of flame lick at his feet. Death. A dry, slow death. That is what lurks behind that clinical, academic phrase 'a depressed condition'.

Morphine