--Wow, fascinating, makes me SO WISH I could see it. Plus, I'd like to see it just for the animated woodcuts and icons.

Highly recommended! Especially if you can get it on a big screen; I don't think it would fail on a television, but the sheer immersive scale of it was definitely a factor.

Imagine if we did that with currently popular addictive substances--made beautiful and gorgeous accoutrements for them, I mean.

I am afraid I've just flashed on Denis Leary's "Drugs": "For years, pot was just joints. And then bongs came out, and bongs were okay, too, but then bongs weren't good enough for some people! Remember that friend in high school wanted to make bongs out of everything, making bongs out of apples and oranges and shit? Come home one day and find your friend going, 'Hey, look, man! I made a bong out of my head!' . . . What was the problem with just smoking a joint, eating a couple of Twinkies, and going to sleep? Was that a problem? They say marijuana leads to other drugs—no, it leads to fucking carpentry, that's the problem, folks!"

So was it not just the smoking, but the doing of an exotic thing, that attracted Westerners?

I don't see why the nineteenth century should have been any different from others in that respect.