Opium Made Easy

Nowadays what leisure time I do have tends to be spent in the garden, a passion that in recent years has turned into a professional interest—I am, among other things, a garden writer. I mention this to help explain the keen interest I took in Jim Hogshire’s subsequent project: a somewhat unconventional treatise on gardening titled Opium for the Masses, published in 1994 by an outfit in Port Townsend, Washington, called Loompanics Unlimited. The book’s astonishing premise is that anyone can obtain opiates cheaply and safely and maybe even legally—or at least beneath the radar of the authorities, who, if Hogshire was to be believed, were overlooking something rather significant in their pursuit of the war on drugs.