1
A book is open in front of me and this is what it has tosay about the symptoms of morphine withdrawal:'.. morbid anxiety, a nervous depressed condition, irritability, weakening of the memory, occasionalhallucinations and a mild impairment of consciousness..' I have not experienced any hallucinations, but I canonly say that the rest of this description is dull, pedestrianand totally inadequate.' Depressed condition' indeed! Having suffered from this appalling malady, I hereby enjoinall doctors to be more compassionate toward theirpatients. What overtakes the addict deprived of morphinefor a mere hour or two is not a 'depressed condition': it isslow death. Air is insubstantial, gulping it down is useless.. there is not a cell in one's body that does not crave.. but crave what? This is something which defies analysisand explanation. In short, the individual ceases to exist:he is eliminated. The body which moves, agonises andsuffers is a corpse. It wants nothing, can think of nothingbut morphine. To die of thirst is a heavenly, blissful deathcompared with the craving for morphine. The feeling mustbe something like that of a man buried alive, clawing at theskin on his chest in the effort to catch the last tiny bubblesof air in his coffin, or of a heretic at the stake, groaning andwrithing as the first tongues of flame lick at his feet. Death. A dry, slow death. That is what lurks behindthat clinical, academic phrase 'a depressed condition'.Mikhail Bulgakov
2
I, the unfortunate Doctor Polyakov, who became addicted to morphine in February of this year, warn anyone who may suffer the same fate not to attempt to replace morphine with cocaine. Cocaine is a most foul and insidious poison. Yesterday Anna barely managed to revive me with camphor injections and today I am half dead.Mikhail Bulgakov