Interestingly, the idea that a man suppresses his evil nature and it rebounds to the surface with the use of some exotic chemical...drug?...is not new to humanity. Drugs have been the bane of most societies since Biblical times.
While making drugs legal solves the moral issue of penalizing someone for their choice of self destructive self indulgence, it doesn't solve the real issue, which is an individual's needs to escape his own personal reality.
Drugs in the context of the good Doctor Jekyll is a good man screaming to accept himself, with the inability to do so, so the subversion of his moral character through the use of mind altering drugs, which not only allow him to escape himself...but to quite literally become another person. Free of inhibitions, moral character or positivity.
Surely, Robert Louis Stevenson wasn't encouraging man to experiment with drugs, but rather warning of the nature of self destructive self indulgence as a method to deal with one's life.
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