Nick Tosches Searches for The Last Opium Den

Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death. ?Jean Cocteau

Let me out, for I wanna get off. This is the user's wish: to slip out of the illusive raga of time plus distance, and to observe the equation from afar. To literally get high. To awaken from the dream of life. You're not a user?

Trust old Jean, who haughtily sucked the sap of heavenly dick but looked for other ways (art, famous art friends, Piaf, being French) to lose the plot: You're here, on your ass, you're using something?yoga? Sex? TV? Booze? Travel? Food? Pills? Music? Cigs? AA? Intellect? Amazon??as at least a temporary rest stop from whatever novel you're living on. And like those Russian dolls within dolls, your jumping the train of life/death/love on a passkey of butts/books/blow might end you up on a smaller, faster train that will kill you right quick. Or worse: kill you sloooow. Whatever your something is, you can bet that it doesn't compete with what the Sumerians, circa 3400 BC, called the "joy plant." The opium poppy.

The seed pod of the opium poppy exudes a milky sap, which turns darker and thicker as it oozes out. This is opium in its crudest form. Poppy cum.

Let me out, for I wanna get off. Or, as Nick Tosches puts it, more succinctly, at the beginning of The Last Opium Den (Bloomsbury, 80 pages, $12.95): "Fuck this world." This sort of bitterness sounds right; for it takes a streak of anger and disgust to spark any good drug mission. He is sitting in a friend's twee restaurant in Lower Manhattan, watching men discuss the bouquet of their incredibly expensive glasses of wine while his friend smiles at them. "[This smile] is to their purblind eyes both gratification and benediction..." This is not truly a smile of complicity, for Tosches' friend "has sold for several hundred dollars what cost him far less..." Meanwhile, on Tosches' plate is a common roasted onion with a small dollop of caviar. It cost $35. Tosches got beat, and he knows it: "Fuck this world of pseudo-sophisticated rubes...these rubes who turned New York into a PG-rated mall and oh so loved it thus." I'll add Emerson: "Give me truths;/For I am weary of the surfaces,/And die of inanition."

In other words, fuck the onion. Fuck it: with that terse phrase and the truth therein, most grandiose drug runs begin?an inspired search for some kind of source. And Tosches' mission to smoke opium in an opium den?to do it up right?is damn inspired, even if it is guilt-laced. He claims to be against drugs, but he has learned that opium is effective as a treatment for his diabetes. He consults with a priest, who okays his search. But I'm with Tosches all the way, regardless of the fact that he needs a benediction from a middle man?hey, who doesn't? The Last Opium Den had me from hello with these opening lines: "You see, I needed to go to hell. I was, you might say, homesick."

Tosches' lampooning (every junkie will agree with him here) of a wine connoisseur's rhapsody of scents and flavors in a "1978 Chateau Margaux" is also most gratifying. He writes: "How could so sophisticated a nose fail to detect the cow shit with which this most celebrated estate in Bordeaux fertilizes its wines?" For the great many of us joy plant users, who have had only?only??heroin (opium's dirty little progeny), we also know that once one has had a whiff of the poppy (no matter how reconstituted or stepped-on), the pleasures of alcohol spirits are, well...not as pleasurable. This is not a new junkie conceit. Heroin hauteur has been around longer than heroin chic, and the opium snobs think all other drugs?especially the legal ones?are really bush league. In 1821, Thomas De Quincey published The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, which Tosches quotes: "No one, 'having once tasted the divine luxuries of opium, will afterwards descend to the gross and mortal enjoyments of alcohol.'" If the soul of the finest wine is lowly "vinegar," as Tosches observes, then the soul of opium is "the taste of the breath of illimitableness." The soul of opium is nothing more, or less, than the lowly, divine candor of a simple flower. And opium connoisseurs (unlike their wine counterparts) know this. The opium high is so rarefied, so off-the-train, one hesitates to even call it a "drug."

His search takes him to Hong Kong, to Bangkok, to Phnom Penh, to Chiang Mai, only to discover that opium is, alas, a "dead drug"?no longer cost-effective; a stately, mint Edsel in a market of throwaway V-12s. If opium is the hot air balloon, then heroin is the top fuel dragster. The users (not to mention the suppliers) today want the faster model. Ten tons of raw opium reduces to one ton of heroin, and its cash value has gone up exponentially by the time it leeches onto the American streets, making heroin the hard drug version of Tosches' $35 onion. "[Morphine and its derivative heroin] offered oblivion, not ethereality, a rush into the void rather than a slow drifting to blissful serenity," Tosches writes (and I cannot agree with him on that; he must have talked to a freak who was doing it all wrong). "They did not want a drawn-out ceremony, a ritual; they wanted the rush..." In a blow to the East, delivered, of course, by the West and its accelerated tastes, "[t]he flower of joy" had been synthesized into "the flower of misery."

Tosches finds many flowers of misery on his tour of duty: whores too young for menses; Sham Shui Po gangsters with all the pure heroin, explosives, speed, mountains of pills, flawless counterfeit dollars and all the slaves a Yankee could ever crave are certainly his for the buying, "[b]ut no one can bring me to an opium den. Why? Because there is no such thing."

Eventually, in Cambodian swamp country, a friend of a friend "who will do anything for money" takes Tosches to another friend's hut, where Tosches smokes opium for the first time. The Cambodian opium smoker lights the pipe for him, and when Tosches takes his first inhale of the "delicious perfume," the Cambodian man, who speaks no English, nods kindly, and there alights "the baptism of approval in his eyes." I cannot help but recall the overpriced onion man smiling in silent "benediction" at his wine connoisseurs. This similarity should not be a surprise. Even if the soul of opium is the candid flower, the soul of the opium user is probably less than fragrant.

However, the opium high, as Tosches describes it, is beyond the greed or wolfish cravings associated with the easier-to-find McDrugs of today. Even opium as a curse?think of the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz hurling down a field of poppies to make Dorothy and her tribe sleeeep (that's the best she can do? Bring it on!) is gentler than what the so-called Good Witch comes up with as an antidote?a blanket of powdered Peruvian cocaine (okay, snow) that kills the poppies, obliterates the evil scourge and gets everyone skipping back on the journey. Toward death, I presume.

But Tosches still hasn't found what he's been looking for: the opium den. He learns that the Golden Triangle, the bloodied womb of the poppy and the trade, now boasts the spurious languor of the Golden Triangle Resort, and there is an opium museum in Thailand ("when anything is deemed museum-worthy, then surely it is dead"). There is one opium boatman left on the Mekong, and he is an old man. "[A]fter him, the river trade will end." The flower of misery is moments from completely replacing the flower of joy.

Tosches imagines the last den as a secret lair of "dark brocade curtains...[and] exotic concubines," but when he finds it, by way of another Buddhist dilettante during another smoking session in Chiang Mai (he gives him an address and a bag of tea to deliver to the last man who might be able to help him), he discovers a proprietor named Papa, and a dumpy shack in a nameless, crumbling place in Indochina. Tosches is reminded that dens were only opulent during the time of the "golden-era salons of Shanghai...public opium dens have always been dives."

The fact that the last opium den looks like a crackhouse with a toppled altar doesn't really matter much. An habitual opium user?and all junkies, for that matter?don't mind a little squalor. Because the high itself is the velvet. It's so clean. For Tosches, his session with the pipe at the end of the book is on the house. This matters to him, for now opium, in the last den, has gone beyond the expensive, lowly onion. "[Papa] is here now only to do what he was born to do, and to ward off the end of a dying world of which he alone remains." The fragrant nugget of opium is lit for him, and within the magic vapors, he is "home." And there's no place like it.