Narcotic adventures in the outposts of the Empire
This is a legendary book in the entire genre of drug literature
This is a review by Michael William from Goodreads.com
Pretty astonishing account of a working-class Englishman's voyages through Asia at the height of the British Empire. James S. Lee also voyaged into drug realms by perfecting a balanced intake of cocaine, hashish and morphine as an engagement with the spirit world, and his escape from a reality that bored him, particularly the reality of day to day life in Great Britain. It's clear that the Britain he came from has not changed enormously - even though the opportunities for a skilled working class man with a huge appetite for life may be relatively restricted now - but it seems likely that the China, India and Malaysia of 1895 are no longer in existence. The harmony that Lee finds there, despite the exhilaration of escapes from man-eating tigers (at that time responsible for the deaths of 80,000 Indians a year), rhinoceroses, Dacoit bandits and various diseases while leading engineering projects designed to modernise the societies he visits, is a mixture of his expert understanding of drugs and his friendships with the locals, including a tender love affair with his wife Mulki, an Indian girl who would move to England and meet Queen Victoria. His open-minded attitude seems startlingly modern, but perhaps it was typical of the benevolent side of the Empire, away from war, aggression and politics, the mutual respect between the outsider and the native. His feelings on the Mutiny at Lucknow even seem mixed, and he presents neither side as moral victors, choosing to highlight the interracial alliances. He presents his thoughts on the universe with clarity, affirming his position as a spiritualist and non-atheist, but simultaneously reserving vociferous criticism of Christianity and the concept of monotheism more akin to something from a Christopher Hitchens interview. He proposes a simplified society, a harmonious existence of all, respectful and working under a kind of socialist system which would save those who then still starved to death in spite of their hard work from the harshest realities of Victorian/Edwardian existence. Lee comes across as a great thing - a learned, spiritually enlightened, existential, hugely courageous pragmatist of the old English type, a rare figure indeed, and the only hints of pride seep through the narrative when he talks of his ability to consume alcohol without effect, and the occasions where other Europeans referred to him as the 'only Englishman they had ever liked'. I can attest to the peculiar sense of warmth that comes from hearing this odd compliment, even nowadays where nations and cultures have refined themselves down into the superpower that is the 'I', the individual, sometimes it's easy to forget that when travelling a lot, thousands of others have marked the same card as you, and the inherent prejudices that come with it. James Lee overcame them by warmth, intelligence and generosity of spirit, it seems, as well as the enlightenment that is possible through manipulation of the projection capacity of the body, rather than just stimulation of the physical. A pity his 'Type B' Elixir of Life, a discovery from the jungles of Sumatra, reputed to restore the human body to its natural state, heartbeat, temperature and health after consumption of other drugs, has been lost. A work of rare transcendental beauty presented with none of the pretence of solving anything, or reassuring anything, a certain sadness and a definite acceptance of the abyss, albeit to Lee a divinely created abyss, related as a pragmatic travelogue - if only Michael Palin had filled his veins with morphine and cocaine like this.
Available at Amazon and on Google Books (read a lot of it for free) Mike Jay wrote the introduction and has also published Emperors Of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century
Colonial opium dens at Meeky Meeky The junkie in literature a PhD dissertation by Christian Volker Kurt W e i g e l t
