Confessions of an English Opium-Eater Book

If there is reincarnation I want them to put a hold on mine until humanity has invented drugs that don't have a down-side to them. No tiresome side effects, like early death. And they'll be cheap. And you'll still be able to fire up your jet pack and get to the office and do your job and impress your team leader. And no skin blemishes. O drugs of the future, I salute you and your friendliness and complete lack of ill effects!

Because you see opium, for one, as Thomas de Quincey demonstrates in this famous but I think not much read book, has seriously deleterious effects upon the user's syntax. It goes all to hell. Thomas can start sentences but finds it really..like...hard... to finish them, so he adds in piles of clausy digressiony blah-blah-blah uninteresting detail in exactly the same way that drugged up people think that talking about their tattoos or their dealer for hours could possibly be interesting even for a halfnanosecond to their undrugged locutors..

When people in the future take their drugs of no down-side, they will converse graciously about matters of interest to all. And plus, they will never sit down heavily on their girlfriend's little cute dog and squash it flat, like Christopher Moltisanti did in The Sopranos. He didn't even realise he'd done it until she came in and asked him where her little darling was. In the future, that will never happen.

O Cosette!