[A sympathetic literary portrayal of opiate addiction allows a writer] "to demonstrate a personal knowledge of the lower depths, which has increasingly become a requirement for an imaginative writer to be taken seriously, at least in literary circles. We do not live in an auspicious age for the likes of Jane Austen or Henry James: we want raw reality now, and raw reality is necessarily wretched" (Dalrymple, Romancing Opiates, p. 94).

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