Robert DeRopp, in the 1957 book "Drugs and the Mind", was perhaps the first to express skepticism at Ludlow’s “addiction” story, noting that “o one seriously interested in the effects of drugs on the mind should fail to read Ludlow’s book,” but accusing Ludlow of a “hypertrophy of the imagination and an excessive dependence on the works of De Quincey” (although he also found "The Hasheesh Eater" to be “more lively and more colorful reading than… the grossly overrated confessions of that ‘English opium-eater.’”). DeRopp suspected that “in many places scientific impartiality has been sacrificed in the interests of literary effect.”