Opium
Opiate History, Nineteenth Century America
from the book licit and illicit drugs
America during the nineteenth century could quite properly be described as a dope fiend's paradise.
Opium was on legal sale conveniently and at low prices throughout the century; morphine came into common use during and after the Civil War; and heroin was marketed toward the end of the century. These opiates and countless pharmaceutical preparations containing them were as freely accessible as aspirin is today. They flowed mostly through five broad channels of distribution, all of them quite legal:
- Physicians dispensed opiates directly to patients, or wrote prescriptions for them.
- Drugstores sold opiates over the counter to customers without a prescription.
- Grocery and general stores as well as pharmacies stocked and sold opiates. An 1883--1885 survey of the state of Iowa, which then had a population of less than 2,000,000, found 3,000 stores in the state where opiates were on sale-and this did not include the physicians who dispensed opiates directly.
- For users unable or unwilling to patronize a nearby store, opiates could be ordered by mail.
- Finally, there were countless patent medicines on the market containing opium or morphine. They were sold under such names as Ayer's Cherry Pectoral, Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup, Darby's Carminative, Godfrey's Cordial, McMunn's Elixir of Opium, Dover's Powder, and so on. Some were teething syrups for young children, some were soothing syrups, some were recommended for diarrhea and dysentery or for women's trouble. They were widely advertised in newspapers and magazines and on billboards as pain-killers, cough mixtures, women's friends, consumption cures, and so on. One wholesale drug house, it is said, distributed more than 600 proprietary medicines and other products containing opiates.
Most of the opium consumed in the United States during the nineteenth century was legally imported. Morphine was legally manufactured here from the imported opium.6 But opium poppies were also legally grown within the United States. One early reference-perhaps the earliest -was in a letter from a Philadelphia physician, Dr. Thomas Bond, who wrote to a Pennsylvania farmer on August 24, 1781: "The opium you sent is pure and of good quality. I hope you will take care of the seed." During the War of 1812, opium was scarce, but some parties produced it in New Hampshire and sold the product at from $10 to $12 per pound.
1871 Massachusetts Opium Report
In 1871 a Massachusetts official reported:
There are so many channels through which the drug may be brought into the State, that I suppose it would be almost impossible to determine how much foreign opium is used here; but it may easily be shown that the home production increases every year. Opium has been recently made from white poppies, cultivated for the purpose, in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Connecticut, the annual production being estimated by hundreds of pounds, and this has generally been absorbed in the communities where it is made. It has also been brought here from Florida and Louisiana, while comparatively large quantities are regularly sent east from California and Arizona, where its cultivation is becoming an important branch of industry, ten acres of poppies being said to yield, in Arizona, twelve hundred pounds of opium.
Opium was also produced in the Confederate states (Virginia, Tennessee, South Carolina, Georgia) 10 during the Civil War-and perhaps thereafter. Though some states outlawed it earlier, Congress did not ban the cultivation of opium poppies nationally until 1942.
Nineteenth-Century Opium Distribution
The nineteenth-century distribution system reached into towns, villages, and hamlets as well as the large cities. A New England physician-druggist wrote about 1870:
- In this town I began business twenty years since. The population then at 10,000 has increased only inconsiderably, but my sales have advanced from 50 pounds of opium the first year to 300 pounds now; and of laudanum [opium in alcohol] four times upon what was formerly required. About 50 regular purchasers come to my shop, and as many more, perhaps, are divided among the other three apothecaries in the place. Some country dealers also have their quota of dependents.
- A correspondent for the Portland (Maine) Press had this to say about opium users in 1868: In the little village of Auburn ... at least fifty such (as counted up by a resident apothecary) regularly purchase their supplies hereabouts; and the country grocers too, not a few of them, find occasion for keeping themselves supplied with a stock.
- A survey of 10,000 prescriptions filled by thirty-five Boston drugstores in 1888 revealed that 1,481 of them contained opiates. Among prescriptions refilled three or more times, 78 percent contained opiates.
- One Massachusetts druggist, asked to review his opiate sales, added a picturesque detail. He bad only one steady customer, be reported - and that a noted temperance lecturer.
- Nor was the Middle West different from New England. The Annual Report of the Michigan State Board of Health for 1878 reported three opium eaters in the village of Huron (population 437), four opium eaters and one morphine cater in the village of Otisville (population 1,365), 18 opium eaters and 20 morphine eaters in the town of Hillsdale (population 4,189), and so on around the state.16 Some children were included in the statistics.
- Though called opium eaters in the medical literature, most nineteenth century opium users (including Thomas De Quincey, author of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater) were in fact opium drinkers; they drank laudanum or other opiate liquids. Similarly morphine eaters included many who took morphine by injection or in other ways. In a number of the quotations which follow, opium eaters refers generally to morphine as well as opium users. Opium smokers, however, were considered to be in a separate category.
Nineteenth-Century Opium In Britain
The nineteenth-century use of opiates was more or less the same in Britain. A classic report on the English industrial system, The Factory System Illustrated (1842), by W. Dodd, noted that factory workers of the time used opiates-notably laudanum-to quiet crying babies.
In the official Report of the Medical Officer of the Privy Council for 1864 it was observed: To push the sale of opiate ... is the great aim of some enterprising wholesale merchants. By druggists it is considered the leading article.18 The report also noted the giving of opiates to infants; 19 Karl Marx, citing this report in Capital (1867), spoke of the English working-class custom of dosing children with opiates . 20 In 1873 an English physician reported:
- Amongst the three millions and three-quarters [people in London] there are to be found some persons here and there who take [opium] as a luxury, though by far the greater number of those who take it in anything like quantity do so for some old neuralgia or rheumatic malady, and began under medical advice. Neither is it to be found over the agricultural or manufacturing districts, save in the most scattered and casual way. The genuine opium-eating districts are the ague and fen districts of Norfolk and Lincolnshire. There it is not casual, accidental, or rare, but popular, habitual, and common. Anyone who visits such a town as Louth or Wisbeach, and strolls about the streets on a Saturday evening, watching the country people as they do their marketing, may soon satisfy himself that the crowds in the chemists' shops come for opium; and they have a peculiar way of getting it. They go in, lay down their money, and receive the opium pills in exchange without saving a word. For instance, I was at Wisbeach one evening in August 1871; went into a chemist's shop; laid a penny on the counter. The chemist said - "The best?" I nodded. He gave me a pill box and took up the penny; and so the purchase was completed without my having uttered a syllable. You offer money, and get opium as a matter of course. This may show how familiar the custom is.
- In these districts it is taken by people of all classes, but especially by the poor and miserable, and by those who in other districts would seek comfort from gin or beer.
- Godfrey's Cordial-a mixture of opium, molasses for sweetening, and sassafras for flavoring-was especially popular in England. Dr. C. Fraser Brockington reports that in mid-nineteenth-century Coventry, ten gallons of Godfrey's Cordial enough for 12,000 doses-was sold weekly, and was administered to 3,000 infants under two years of age.
- Even greater quantities of opium mixtures were said to be sold in Nottingham.... Every surgeon in Marshland testified to the fact that there was not a labourer's house in which the bottle of opium was not to be seen, and not a child, but who got it in some form. . . . Wholesale druggists reported the sale of immense quantities of opium; a retail druggist dispensed up to 200 pounds a year-in pills and penny sticks or as Godfrey's Cordial.... To some extent this was a practice which had been taken on during the years when malaria was indigenous in the Fens and when, a century before, the poppy had been cultivated for the London market.
Nineteenth-Century Nonmedicinal Use Of Opium
The nonmedicinal use of opiates, while legal in both the United States and England, was not considered respectable. Indeed, as an anonymous but perceptive and well-informed American writer noted in the Catholic World for September 1881, it was as disreputable as drinking alcoholic beverages-and much harder to detect.
The gentleman who would not be seen in a bar-room, however respectable, or who would not purchase liquor and use it at home, lest the odor might be detected upon his person, procures his supply of morphia and has it in his pocket ready for instantaneous use. It is odorless and occupies but little space. . . . He zealously guards his secret from his nearest friend-for popular wisdom has branded as a disgrace that which he regards as a misfortune.
Opiate use was also frowned upon in some circles as immoral-a vice akin to dancing, smoking, theater-going, gambling, or sexual promiscuity. But while deemed immoral, it is important to note that opiate use in the nineteenth century was not subject to the moral sanctions current today. Employees were not fired for addiction. Wives did not divorce their addicted husbands, or husbands their addicted wives. Children were not taken from their homes and lodged in foster homes or institutions because one or both parents were addicted. Addicts continued to participate fully in the life of the community. Addicted children and young people continued to go to school, Sunday School, and college. Thus, the nineteenth century avoided one of the most disastrous effects of current narcotics laws and attitudes-the rise of a deviant addict subculture, cut off from respectable society and without a road back to respectability.
Our nineteenth-century forbears correctly perceived the major objection to the opiates. They are addicting. Though the word addiction was seldom used during the nineteenth century, the phenomenon was well understood. The true nature of the narcotic evil becomes visible, the Catholic World article pointed out, when someone who has been using an opiate for some time attempts to give up its use. Suddenly his eyes are opened to his folly and he realizes the startling fact that he is in the toils of a serpent as merciless as the boa-constrictor and as relentless as fate. With a firm determination to free himself he discontinues its use. Now his sufferings begin and steadily increase until they become unbearable. The tortures of Dives are his; but unlike that miser, he has only to stretch forth his hand to find oceans with which to satisfy his thirst. That human nature is not often equal to so extraordinary a self-denial affords little cause for astonishment. . . . Again and again he essays release from a bondage so humiliating, but meets with failure only, and at last submits to his fate a confirmed opium-eater.
Our nineteenth-century forbears also perceived opiate use as a will-weakening vice-for surely, they insisted, a man or woman of strong will could stop if he tried hard enough. The fact was generally known that addicts deprived of their opiates (when hospitalized for some illness unrelated to their addiction, for example) would lie or even steal to get their drug, and addicts cured of their addiction repeatedly relapsed. Hence there was much talk of the moral degeneration caused by the opiates.
Nevertheless, there was very little popular support for a law banning these substances. Powerful organizations for the suppression of alcoholic stimulants exist throughout the land. An 1881 article in the Catholic World noted, but there were no similar anti-opiate organizations.
The reason for this lack of demand for opiate prohibition was quite simple: the drugs were not a menace to society.
What kinds of people used opiates?
Several characteristics of opiate use under nineteenth-century conditions of low cost and ready legal availability will strike contemporary readers as strange.
- Most users of narcotics in those days were women. An 1878 survey of 1,313 opiate users in Michigan, for example, found that 803 of them (61.2 percent) were females.1 An 1880 Chicago study similarly reported: Among the 235 habitual opium caters, 169 were found to be females, a proportion of about 3 to 1. 2 An Iowa survey in 1885 showed 63.8 percent females.
- The use of opiates by prostitutes did not fully account for this excess of women in the user population. Thus the Chicago report noted: Of the 169 females, about one-third belong to that class known as prostitutes. Deducting these, we still have among those taking the different kinds of opiates, 2 females to 1 male.
- The widespread medical custom of prescribing opiates for menstrual and menopausal discomforts, and the many proprietary opiates advertised for female troubles, no doubt contributed to this excess of female opiate users. A 1914 Tennessee survey, which found that two-thirds of the users were women, noted also that two-thirds of the women were between twenty-five and fifty-five.5 The first twenty years of this period, the survey report commented, is about the age when the stresses of life begin to make themselves felt with women, and includes the beginning of the menopause period. [Nineteenth-century women, on the average, reached menopause somewhat earlier than twentieth-century women do.] It appears reasonable, therefore, to ascribe to this part of female life, no small portion of the addiction among women.
- The extent to which alcohol-drinking by women was frowned upon may also have contributed to the excess of women among opiate users. Husbands drank alcohol in the saloon; wives took opium at home.
- After passage of the Harrison Narcotic Act in 1914, the sex ratio in addiction altered drastically. By 1918 a Special Committee on Investigation appointed by the Secretary of the Treasury could report that drug addiction is about equally prevalent in both sexes. 7 Thereafter the sex ratio continued to change. Estimates during the 1960s indicated that males outnumbered females among known addicts by five to one or more.
A second remarkable fact about the nineteenth-century use of opiates in the United States was the age of the users. The 1880 Chicago survey showed an average age for males of 41.4 years and for females of 39.4 years.9 In the small towns of Iowa in 1885, the average age of 235 users was 46.5 years.10 The 1914 Tennessee survey showed an average age of 50.11 Today, in contrast, nearly half of all addicts known to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs are 30 or younger, and only 13.6 percent are over 40.12 The age at which they started taking narcotic's is, of course, much earlier-usually in the teens or early twenties. Thus one aftermath of the twentieth-century narcotic laws has been a shift in the brunt of the addiction problem from menopausal females to adolescent males.
The 1881 Catholic World article, cited above, said much the same thing more eloquently:
Opium-eating, unlike the use of alcoholic stimulants, is an aristocratic vice and prevails more extensively among the wealthy and educated classes than among those of inferior social position; but no class is exempt from its blighting influence. The merchant, lawyer, and physician are to be found among the host who sacrifice the choicest treasures of life at the shrine of Opium. The slaves of Alcohol may be clothed in rags, but vassals of the monarch who sits enthroned on the poppy are generally found dressed in purple and fine linen.
The 1885 Iowa survey similarly noted that the majority of opiate users are to be found among the educated and most honored and useful members of society.
Finally, there is no evidence of any disproportionate use of opiates among black people during the nineteenth century; indeed, there are few references to their use of opiates at all. Surveys made in 1913 in Jacksonville, Florida, and throughout the state of Tennessee in 1914, turned up a much lower proportion of opiate users among blacks than among whites.16 The high proportion of black people among known opiate addicts during the 1950s and 1960s is a quite recent development* visible chiefly since World War II. It appears to be closely related to a shift in the channels of heroin distribution (see below) and not to any predilection of black people for opiates. Since the late 1960s heroin use has increased again among youthful middle-class whites
Among 68,864 opiate addicts known to the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs as of December 31, 1970, 48.4 percent were said to be black. The great majority of addicts, however, were not known to the bureau.
Books Opium: A History
Traces opium's history from the first evidence of poppy cultivation (possibly as early as 4,000 B.C.) to the drug wars of today. Explores its uses in different cultures, its roles in British and Chinese political affairs, its use by artists and musicians, and its horrifying ramifications for addicts. Written with admirable attention to detail.
Informative book details opium and its derivatives such as morphine and heroin. It is fascinating to learn about the effect this drug has had on various cultures such as China and India. Anyone wanting to obtain information for academic purposes or just to learn more about this drug will enjoy this book.
Opium: A History Opium:
A Portrait of the Heavenly Demon
A picture history of opium. Photos, drawings, book covers, sketches, paintings, engravings, and other artwork featuring opium related scenes and paraphernalia are found on almost every page of this beautiful book. Includes a comprehensive overview of written works throughout history which feature opium as their theme.
The focus is on the wealth of images and literature celebrating or condemning this fabled drug, and on the writers, artists and photographers who have tried to capture the essence of opium's allure. All the works mentioned are in the bibliography as a resource for further reading.
Opium: A Portrait of the Heavenly Demon The Politics of Heroin:
CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade
A greatly revised and expanded edition of Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. Tells a fascinating story, that opium was often the only viable form of currency. The author produces considerable disturbing evidence that US authorities are guilty at least of complicity in the global drug trade.
Exposes basic hypocrisy in American policy making, and demonstrates that, as long as powerful government bureaucracies work at cross-purposes, America's drug problem will not be easily solved.
The Politics of Heroin
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