Can opium cause hallucinations?
My friend said that taking enough of opium can cause hallucinations.What does it exactly do to you anyway?
Hallucinations are almost the main reason for smoking opium. It was used in China for many centuries and was taken up by poets in England and France in the 1800s for that purpose.
http://www.frontlist.com/detail/0806514833
A great page on opium in general, its history, what it does to you, and what makes it the classic opioid is The Plant Of Joy.
Sorry, exapno, but the primary reason for using opium is the euphoria. Said euphoria will often cause delusions, but actual hallucinations (seeing, hearing, smelling etc. of things which are not actually there) is less common.
I don’t know about opium, but codeine can cause paranoid delusions. I learned that the hard way after a tonsillectomy (in adulthood). I decided that the pain was preferable.
In the haze of the morning, China sits on eternity
While the opium farmers sell dreams to obscure fraternities
—Brian Eno
Well, Dr. QtM, I did say almost the main reason…
OK, it was a bit of hyperbole. I’ll grant you that the primary reason is euphoria, but it’s quite easy to find mentions of hallucinations in any historical discussion of opium use. Whether those are being defined in the strict modern medical sense is difficult to say.
Hmm. With a little searching I see that the well-named, if not well-spelled Paraphanelia has started four threads about drugs in the past two days.
Opioids are bad news. Don’t mess with them. Ever. The doc can give you more details.
opium sure causes hallucination and in most cases grave ones that might distort the ideas and views of one who smoke it .
vatsy
Opium and opiates are narcotics, not hallucinogens. They may cause the user to nod off into a particularly vivid and euphoric dream state and experience hypnogogic hallucinations, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge would tell you, but they don’t really cause the holy-crap-my-shoes-are-talking variety of hallucinations associated with the hallucinogens (LSD, mescaline, etc.).
Opium doesn’t cause hallucinations per se, in the same way, say, LSD does, but causes extremely vivid and often frightening dreams in habitual users. I think these dreams are more what the romantic poets, etc., drew on more than any waking hallucinations. And remember, they were usually sucking down a fair amount of absinthe, too. The active ingredients in opium aren’t really any different than what you’d find in prescription painkillers.
Shit. Pravnik hit “submit reply” first.
You are very observant, exapno!
What’s the deal, Para? Both with your odd name and your focus on controlled substances? This board is dedicated to fighting ignorance, not serving the drug culture.
Sorry for the bump. But I did found this forum because of this thread. It showed up when I was looking for information about opium. Anyway, I just wanted to add in to the conversation and correct some misconceptions.
Generally speaking, you can’t hallucinate from opium. If we’re talking about the effects, think alcohol. It’s basically a depressant that will cause drowsiness but feelings of elation are normal as well. It basically depends on how you consumed it.
Source: effects of opium
Opium and opiates do not cause hallucinations in the sense of visual distortions or seeing things that are not there, however they can put someone into a vivid dream state called nodding.
This is taking place while the person’s eyes are closed.
Oh, I’ve known friends and family members who were hospitalized and receiving morphine.
They spent a lot of time talking to and about dead people. And I mean talking TO them, carrying on conversations with them as though the dead were right in the room.
My mother also baked cookies, crocheted, and tried to sell her monitoring equipment in ICU.
~VOW
Well, that is one way to defray the high cost of hospitalization:D
I volunteer to test the hypothesis. PM me and we’ll arrange for you to ship me the opium.
I would think opiates would cause more of a disassociate state rather than an just straight LSD type hallucinations. With hallucinations you are alert but seeing things that aren’t there. In a disassociate state, you’re basically in a walking dream. Like kind of sleep-walking. You react to things or memories that are in your subconscious, like you would in a dream-state. But you almost can’t differentiate the dream from real life. Like a sleep-walker.
Its hard to describe the difference unless you’ve been there and done that.
Well NJTT below said it better than I could.
Well, yes, but the thing is, LSD, mescaline and the like do not really do the later either. Neither do they commonly cause you to see things (things that get taken for real physical objects in your actual environment) that are not there. Sometimes hallucinogens may, like opiates, make you to slip into a vivid dreaming or hypnagogic state, where, as in a normal dream, you are in a world that is not really there (maybe that ought to count as hallucination, I don’t know), but that is different from seeing things that are not there within a real world that you are mostly aware of.
Hallucinogens certainly have powerful effects on your perception and thinking, but it is not really a matter of seeing things that are not there, or hearing sounds that are not actually sounding. For the most part, you see and hear the things that really are there, but you see and hear (and smell, taste and feel) them differently from usual, and they often seem to have a significance quite different from that which they usually have. (And maybe that ought to count as hallucination too. After all, it is what hallucinogens actually do reliably cause.)
I speak both from experience and from some fairly extensive reading of the relevant scientific (and some not so scientific) literature.
The concept of hallucination is actually very slippery and poorly defined (even in the scientific literature), which makes it next to impossible to give a clear yes or no answer to questions of this sort.