Fiction

Interest in heroin is surging back after years of dormancy. Why? Supply and demand! Drug cartels have increased the supply of heroin, so that it is cheaper and purer than ever before. Secondly, the Federal government’s recent crack down on popular prescription opiates like OxcyContin, Percocet, and Vicodin so they are increasingly hard and costly to obtain on the black market. A recent study reveals that people who had recently abused prescription opiates are 19 times more likely to try heroin.

Fueled by a boom in supply and a decline in cost, heroin use is up around the nation and spreading to segments of the population once considered unlikely users. “Cool people are doing it!” Remember the old slogan: “Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n Roll”? Heroin has a sexy side—very sexy. Black Opium: Ecstasy of the Forbidden brings heroin’s sexy visions to life.

The world of black opium is a forbidden world where human bodies find themselves possessed and driven by desires which consume them in the flames of hot-blooded ecstasy, Black Opium describes every aspect of an opium smoker’s life in lurid detail.

Often compared to James Joyces' Dubliners, Farrère’s Black Opium consists of seventeen compelling tales delineating six periods in the history and use of opium. This edition of Black Opium is a reissue of And/Or Press’ 1974 Fitz Hugh Ludlow edition, which features salacious illustrations by Alexander King, and the addition of a foreword by Dr. Moraes.

Cocaine is the story of a young man who runs off to Paris to seek fame, fortune, and fun. Pitigrilli’s classic novel charts the comedy and pathos of a young man's tragic trajectory. Tito Arnaudi is a dandified hero with several mistresses he juggles. A failed medical student, Tito is hired as a journalist in Paris, where he investigates cocaine dens and invents lurid scandals and gruesome deaths that he sells to newspapers as his own life becomes more outrageous than his phony press reports.

Telling of orgies and strawberries soaked in champagne and ether, Tito lives with intensity as he pursues his Italian girlfriend Maud (née Maddalena) and wealthy Armenian Kalantan, who insists on making love in a black coffin. Provocatively illustrated, filled with lush, intoxicating prose, Cocaine is a wicked novel about the Lost Generation in 1920s Paris. Dizzy and decadent, Pitigrilli leaves nothing unexplored as he presents astonishing descriptions of upper class debauching — strawberries and chloroform, naked dancing, cocaine aplenty, and guests openly injecting morphine. Despite its wit, Cocaine is a sobering account of the dangers of drugs and sexual obsession. Tito happily trades in his twilight years for moments of wicked ecstasy.