The Underworld of the East: Being Eighteen Years' Actual Experiences of the Underworlds, Drug Haunts and Jungles of India, China and the Malay Arc

An amazing forgotten classic that rewrites the history of drug use! James S. Lee was a young Yorkshire engineer in the late Victorian era, and he wanted a bit of adventure. He went to India, where he narrowly avoided death in a pit gas explosion and escaped a man-eating tiger. Ill with fever, he consulted a doctor who administered morphine. Impressed, he got his own syringes and supply. Before long, he had a habit. But this isn't a moral tale about the evils of drugs: Lee returns to the doctor-who recommends injecting cocaine systematically with the morphine to cure his mild dependency. It works, and he spends much of the next thirty years in the Far East and Africa with his bag of syringes having a swimmingly good time with morphine, coke, opium, hashish and a several still-unknown drugs he discovers in Sumatra. China holds most fascination for Lee, and his account of Shanghai in the Twentieth Century's early years is compellingly decadent. His journal ends when the ruling classes ban his drugs of choice, fearful of the effects of consumption on their social inferiors. Lee relinquishes them with equanimity and no after-effects.

In his many adventures in the Far East he describes with great insight his thoughts and experiences of a world completely alien to the majority of his contemporaries. He had an almost gaian sensitivity to nature and he speculates with great wisdom on the origins and future of the world.