Crowley's final years were shadowed by heroin addiction. The first doctor to prescribe it seems to have been Harold Batty Shaw, based at 122 Harley Street, whom Crowley had been seeing since 1898 and who prescribed it for bronchitis at Christmas 1919. But Crowley had a longer relationship with opiates: he had experimented with laudanum in 1907, and his diary suggests he was also using heroin by the time of his first Jermyn Street lodging in the same year (he includes it in a list of things ‘allowed’ by his health regime, mainly directed towards dieting).
In a 1924 Paris diary he discusses his astrological and elemental “idiosyncrasy” for heroin, and he also records tremendous pleasure, writing what could be described as happy nonsense: “It has been like thirteen masturbations, a menstruation orgie, a five-man buggery competition, sixteen rapes of assorted quadrupeds [etc.]… and a pot of marmalade thrown in.” Heroin users often experience pleasurable itching, leading to very pleasurable light scratching, and Crowley writes “I itch marvellously lewdly, and to scratch – Ah! But for to scratch, it is to scratch!”
Unfortunately by this time he was addicted: “I seriously dread the failure of supply.” He managed to beat it and stay clean for some years, but by 1936 if not earlier he was driven back to morphine for asthma relief, and by 1939 he was injecting regularly, with the return of a full habit. His most distressing withdrawal symptom was the return of asthma. Crowley obtained heroin from Heppell's chemist, with branches at 169 Piccadilly, 35 Haymarket and elsewhere, and in his final years they posted it to him.
His health – surprisingly delicate all his life – was very bad in later years, with teeth regularly breaking or falling out and an injection abscess on his leg, on top of asthma and lifelong bowel troubles and vomiting, never adequately diagnosed. He would be woken by diarrhoea, and vomited on the floor in theatres and cinemas, attributing it to excitement. A whole troupe of doctors have walk-on parts in the later diaries – Crawshaw (heroin), Lodge (morphine sulphate), Vernon, Peacock, Macdonald and others – but one late doctor in particular is remembered, due to a gutter press story that Crowley had put a curse on him. As James Laver remembers it, “the story was current (I do not vouch for it) that, shortly before his end, his doctor had said to him: ‘I am going to cut off your heroin.’ Crowley replied: ‘If you do I shall die – and I shall take you with me.’ He did die, and the doctor died a fortnight later.” 1
In fact, the doctor coincidentally died not just within two weeks, but within a day. He was found dead in his bath. This was Dr William Brown Thomson, a man Crowley liked (“Charming humorous lowland Scot, very clever and thorough”). He was at two Mayfair practices, 15 Half Moon Street, running between Piccadilly and Curzon Street, and 83 Duke Street (not the one off Jermyn Street), near Grosvenor Square, from where he told Crowley he was going to reduce his dose.