Thomas De Quincey's works are on Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=Thomas+De+Quin...

Confessions of an English Opium Eater, which is autobiographical, is his most famous work.

Finally got in through the Google referrer (provided by the web link which brings you to a Google search for the article's name), after unblocking Cloudflare and Google in order to solve a captcha where I had to identify street signs and then storefronts for Google's image identification algorithms, after which I had to whitelist NYT cookies, about 12 scripts, and a few static image domains.

Anddd that was my 5 minute break, back to work.

Why not just open in an incognito window? That always works for me.

That doesn't get me in? Maybe it's because I'm on a VPN.

The captcha's from Cloudflare not liking VPNs, and the bunch of whitelisting is just from their site being very bloated and me not wanting to load unneeded crap.

For the lazy:

https://www.google.com/search?q=He+Loved+Opium,+Murder+and+W...

There's also the "web" link between the post, provided by HN. It points to the same URL.

Usually you can find one or two people complaining that stories like this shouldn't be on HN, but I'd like to flip that one time and encourage people to keep posting them. I enjoy the sensation of clearing my palate, as I take my tech news from many proverbial firehoses, and the flavors are not always savory.

Please stop linking to the NY times and their crappy paywall

Blocked by paywall.

On top of that I just tried to sign up for an account. I don't want to connect Google or Facebook so I tried to use their registration. It wasn't possible to do in Chrome. I decided try the nytimes.com homepage and I could probably sign up there but the registration is over an insecure http page.

I switched to Safari and was able to create an account. Went back to Chrome and still couldn't login. Not worth it.

I opened the "web" link under the story headline in an incognito/private window and clicked the nytimes link. No account, registration, etc.

And when I wanted to cancel the subscription I had to call them, you can't do it online...