What does it mean for a society to fall in love with oblivion? From ancient ritual intoxication to the smoky parlours of 19th-century London, opium has long occupied a strange and seductive place in human history—at once medicine, muse, and menace. This lecture traces the cultural, social, and psychological impact of opium across the ages, culminating in its profound entanglement with Victorian society. In the 1800s, opium was everywhere: prescribed by doctors, sold freely in chemists, and consumed across all classes—from exhausted factory workers to poets, painters, and aristocrats seeking transcendence. It soothed pain, inspired visions, and quietly tightened its grip on a nation in the throes of industrialisation and empire. Through the writings of figures such as Thomas De Quincey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, we explore how opium shaped literature and the creative imagination—fueling dreamlike beauty, but also paranoia, fragmentation, and despair.