Vintage Photographs of Opium Underworlds

Opium found its way into societies the world over during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a range of countries and cultures. 

Women on the floor smoking opium and three eunuchs watching them. 
A still from Georges Rémond’s Dandy-Pacha, 1920.

At that time Paris had in excess of 1,200 opium dens. Opium users included Charles Baudelaire, Picasso, Brassaï and Jean Cocteau, who shared his struggles against opium with the world in writings such as Opium.

Fernand Cormon, 1878.

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