Suddenly every book I read or film I watch has a scene of someone taking opium. Recently I went from Graham Greene's The Quiet American (1955; film, 2002) to Sergio Leone's Once Upon Time in America (1984) to Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971, above), all of which feature main characters smoking opium. In fact, both Once Upon a Time and McCabe end with their main characters lying on their sides in a den.
The novel I am currently reading, a western by Gil Adamson called The Outlander (2006), has its main character Mary Boulton purchasing a vial of laudanum (a liquid form of opium) from a dry goods merchant who said it would help her with her body aches. Strangely, the merchant doesn't suggest a dosage, and Mary takes not one tincture but five.
This is by far the funniest scene in an otherwise serious book, when the merchant, who had contracted Mary to shave his miner clients after they bathed in his tubs, corrals her dazed self, hands her a straight razor and points her to a chair where one of two men are waiting:
"In the end there was no bloodletting, though the Norseman was unusually closely shaved." (274)
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