Drug of Choice: Opium Many scholars consider Manchester's Romantic writer Thomas De Quincey to be the first author to pen a book in the addiction literature tradition, publishing Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in 1821. As with many of the drug users of the 19th and early 20th Centuries, the former child genius, journalist and writer was prescribed his substance of choice to alleviate the symptoms of a physical ailment. De Quincey first used opium in 1804 to relieve his neuralgia, but began using it for pleasure a maximum of once a week through 1812. The following year, he was using on a daily basis, upping his usage to cope with illness and escape from his grief over the death of poet and friend William Wordsworth's young daughter Catherine. Between the years of 1813 and 1819 his daily dose was very high, and caused him to suffer badly, the experiences of which he detailed in the final sections of Confessions. The addiction remained with De Quincey for the rest of his life, with the doses he took fluctuating between the 'enormous' in 1843, and the 61 days he spent without the drug in 1848.
