In the Autumn issue of the Salisbury Review, Dalrymple reviews Opium: Reality’s Dark Dream by Thomas Dormandy. Although he calls it “the best and most enjoyable single-volume history of opium and the drugs derived from it” and praises the author for the clarity and confidence of his prose, he also notes that his disagreements with the book are “profound and, in relation to the theme of the book, important”. In short, Dormandy accepts much of the modern conventional wisdom about opiates that Dalrymple criticized in Junk Medicine (called Romancing Opiates in the US). Still, Dalrymple concludes that, “No student of the subject will fail to learn a lot from Dormandy, and in the most pleasant way possible.”

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