Interest in heroin is surging back after years of dormancy. Why? Supply and demand! Drug cartels have increased the supply of heroin, so that it is cheaper and purer than ever before. Secondly, the Federal government's recent crack down on popular prescription opiates like OxcyContin, Percocet, and Vicodin so they are increasingly hard and costly to obtain on the black market. A recent study reveals that people who had recently abused prescription opiates are 19 times more likely to try heroin. Fueled by a boom in supply and a decline in cost, heroin use is up around the nation and spreading to segments of the population once considered unlikely users. "Cool people are doing it!" Remember the old slogan: "Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n Roll"? Heroin has a sexy side--very sexy. Black Opium: Ecstasy of the Forbidden brings heroin's sexy visions to life. The world of black opium is a forbidden world where human bodies find themselves possessed and driven by desires which consume them in the flames of hot-blooded ecstasy, Black Opium describes every aspect of an opium smoker's life in lurid detail. Often compared to James Joyces' Dubliners, Farrere's Black Opium consists of seventeen compelling tales delineating six periods in the history and use of opium. This edition of Black Opium is a reissue of And/Or Press' 1974 Fitz Hugh Ludlow edition, which features salacious illustrations by Alexander King, and the addition of a foreword by Dr. Moraes.

PSYCHEDELICS / LITERATURE "Moksha is more than a book about psychedelics--although it may well be the most intelligent, well-rounded one of its kind. It is also another chance to spend hours in Huxley's fascinating company as he talks about art, literature, religion, psychology, and ecology." --Los Angeles Times "A remarkably stimulating, worthwhile volume." --Publisher's Weekly "The final chapter, climaxing in Laura Huxley's description of her husband's death, is one of the most transfixing pieces of reportage I've ever read." --Soho Weekly News In May 1953, while in the company of his wife and a physician friend, Aldous Huxley took four-tenths of a gram of mescaline. The mystical and transcendent experience that followed set him off on an exploration that was to produce a revolutionary body of work about the inner reaches of the human mind. Huxley was decades ahead of his time in his anticipation of the dangers modern culture was creating through explosive population increase, headlong technological advance, and militant nationalism, and he saw psychedelics as the greatest means at our disposal to "remind adults that the real world is very different from the misshapen universe they have created for themselves by means of their culture-conditioned prejudices." Much of Huxley's writings following his 1953 mescaline experiment can be seen as his attempt to reveal the power of these substances to awaken a sense of the sacred in people living in a technological society hostile to mystical revelations. Moksha, a Sanskrit word meaning "liberation," is a collection of the prophetic and visionary writings of Aldous Huxley. It includes selections from his acclaimed novels Brave New World andIsland, both of which envision societies centered around the use of psychedelics as stabilizing forces, as well as pieces from The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, his famous works on consciousness-expansion. Also included are magazine articles, interviews, letters, and scientific papers that vividly demonstrate the evolution of his ideas and offer an engrossing record of the journey. MICHAEL HOROWITZ and CYNTHIA PALMER are the directors of the Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library in San Francisco, the only library in the world devoted exclusively to the literature of mind-altering drugs. Michael Horowitz was Timothy Leary's archivist and is coauthor of The High Times Encyclopedia of Recreational Drugs. Palmer and Horowitz live in northern California.