An essay work from 1860 in which Baudelaire reflects on wine, hashish and opium. Part of it describes the effects of the drugs and the dreams or moods they bring, and part draws on Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Baudelaire is both fascinated and wary. He treats the search for an artificial paradise as a moral and psychological problem, and warns of the cost to will and character. It is an important early study of drugs and the imagination.