Almost 150 years have passed since the publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland on May 24, 1865, and this classic of British literature continues to feed a thousand and one interpretations. One of the most widespread is that its crazy atmosphere could only be conceived with the help of drugs. Let us not forget that, in the days of Lewis Carroll – the pseudonym of the English mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson -, opium and an alcoholic beverage that contains it as an ingredient, laudanum , were legally consumed. To this must be added that Carroll suffered from headaches , so he was able to turn to a strong remedy to alleviate them. In fact, there is a disorder called Alice in Wonderland syndrome or micropsy, which consists of seeing things distorted and precisely causing acute headaches.
The truth is that many have appreciated in the magic mushrooms ingested by the protagonist, the hookah that the caterpillar smokes or the smile suspended in the air of the Cheshire cat clear references to drugs. This reading of the work was especially popular during the 1960s, when LSD and other psychotropics were all the rage. But most of the experts in the novel, which had its continuation with Alice through the looking glass (1871), do not want to hear about this possibility, because they simply see a waste of imagination with the sole purpose of entertaining.
