4

Poverty, Potions and Poppy-heads

Throughout the nineteenth century, opium was as widely used in Britain, Western Europe and America as aspirin or paracetamol are today – if not more so – and it was the main ingredient of a vast range of medicines, patent medicines and quack ‘remedies’.

The extensive use of opium was staggering. As Berridge and Edwards outlined in Opium and the People, consumption in Britain increased between 1831 and 1859 at an average rate of 2.4 per cent per annum. Imports rose from around 91,000 pounds (41,300 kilograms) in 1830 to 280,000 pounds (127,000 kilograms) in 1860, re-exported opium rising from 41,000 pounds (18,600 kilograms) to 151,000 pounds (68,500 kilograms), more than half selling to America.

Despite opium production in India, which was largely under British control, most of the importation came from Turkey, which was deemed to manufacture a higher-quality product. Indian opium had a low morphine content – at 4–6 per cent – which made it unsuitable for British pharmaceutical use: Turkish opium had a 10–13 per cent morphine content and could easily be exported through Smyrna, which had long been an important trading centre, used particularly by the British who had established commercial links with Turkey since the founding of the Levant Company in 1581.

The Ottoman Empire was a large market for British cotton goods, which were traded for corn, silk, raisins, wool, sponges and opium: between 1827 and 1869, 80 to 90 per cent of all imported opium was Turkish. The trading level never dropped below 70 per cent even with the advent on the market of Persian opium which was imported direct from Persia or via Constantinople where it was repackaged to look like the Turkish variety.

The Turkish near-monopoly on opium was not without detractors. In 1829, a Dr Webster stated quite bluntly that, if possible, opium should be grown in and obtained from a British colony, removing the reliance upon what he termed ‘the rascally Turks’. Such a wish was, however, beyond the bounds of fulfilment. The trade was too well established to be overturned by jingoistic considerations.

At first, the trading lines followed the old silk and spice routes by way of the Low Countries, France, Germany, Gibraltar and Malta and, of course, Italy, where Venice was in the last stages of decline as a trading power. In time, alternative routes developed. Marseilles became a major shipment centre, a position it held until the 1970s. Rotterdam and Amsterdam also developed into maritime drugs centres, which they remain to this day. Yet, by 1850, most opium was shipped direct from Turkey aboard British vessels, doing away with transhipment and foreign tariff charges.

In Britain, Liverpool, Dover and Bristol were all opium ports, yet the main centre for trading in Europe was London where a cartel of importers controlled the business. Initially, these merchants were those whose firms were descended from the Levant Company: when the company finally closed in 1825, the cartel disintegrated, leaving opium susceptible to free trade. Wholesale importers moved in, purchasing opium both by private deal and at auction. As in any commodity market, there were also spot buyers who speculated when they saw prices favourably low but who were not dedicated opium traders.

The centre of opium business was around Mincing Lane in London, where 90 per cent of the trade was conducted. It had been an important market-place since the sixteenth century but, by the mid-1700s, it was associated primarily with opium and, to a lesser extent, other drugs. Opium transactions were sealed in Garraway’s Coffee House, near the Royal Exchange, by a system known as ‘buying by the candle’. A small candle was lit at the start of an auction and bids accepted until the wick burnt away, at which point the highest bid for the consignment ‘under the candle’ was accepted. Auctions took place fortnightly, began at 10.30 in the morning and were attended by about 100 buyers and brokers who bid throughout the day.

On occasion, deals were arranged between the London drug wholesale houses, such as the Apothecaries’ Company or Allen and Hanburys, and individual brokers of whom there were about thirty operating in London. The method of business was thus: every Saturday, a list was published in the counting house of the Apothecaries’ Company providing notice of forthcoming requirements. Brokers submitted samples the following Tuesday. The company’s Buying Committee tested the samples and ordered accordingly. In these circumstances, cargoes in bond were sold prior to customs clearance.

Trading in opium required specific commercial expertise and the rewards could be high, although so too could be the risks. Mincing Lane brokers and dealers seldom worked under a 50 per cent profit margin, which could rise to 100 per cent, but it could just as readily fall. As with any agricultural commodity, prices fluctuated widely according to growing and harvest conditions and the quality of the produce. A second element reducing profit margins was the publication of a monthly current prices list allowing end-buyers, such as chemists, to shop around for the best deal. Other factors stabilising prices were the removal of import duties, the increasing efficiency of business with the advent of postage and railway parcel services and the gradual supplanting of the general import merchant by the dedicated opium dealer. A final influence upon international pricing was the encouragement by producer-governments which advocated switching peasant farming from less commercial and more risky cash crops to opium, thus improving their people’s income and lives, simultaneously increasing local tax revenue.

Prices varied widely. Opium was liable to an import duty of 9 shillings per pound until 1828, then 4s per pound to 1836, when it was cut to 1s per pound, the level at which the duty remained until a free-trade agreement removed it in 1860. The reduction and abolition of tax, linked to increasing import quantities, brought the wholesale price consistently down for much of the nineteenth century.

In 1818, with duty at 9s, Turkish opium wholesaled for about £1 per pound ex-tax, 30s per pound tax paid: in 1851, the wholesale price was 21s per pound, tax paid. Substandard or poorer quality opium, such as Egyptian, was priced in 1858 at 6s 8d per pound, ex-tax. Needless to say, poor harvests or the loss of a cargo (as in 1865, when the SS Crimean ran aground off Smyrna with a cargo of several tonnes of opium) caused price fluctuations but, in general, the cost of opium did not rise more than 25 per cent in a century to 1900.

Despite the modest pricing of opium, there were those who sought ways to produce it without suffering import taxes or dealing with Webster’s ‘rascally Turks’. Between 1740 and 1830, attempts were made to grow poppies and harvest opium in Britain.

The opium poppy was an established wild plant in some parts of Britain and Ireland well before the eighteenth century. Whether it was naturally indigenous or had been introduced is uncertain but it was to be found, most notably in the Fens (the low-lying marshlands of Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire) where it was used to make poppy-head tea and a variety of folk remedies.

The methods of cultivation were first described by a Mr Arnot in 1742:

What I have found most successful is to trench a spot of new rich ground, where Poppies had not grown the preceding year; for if they are continued several years on the same Ground they degenerate. A chusing the ripest and whitest Seed of the great single-flowered Turkey Poppy, I sow it in the month of March very thin and superficially in Drills at two Foot Distance each, to allow Place for Weeding, etc. As soon as the young Plants spring up, I take most of them away, leaving only the strongest most thriving Plants at about a Foot distant from each other.

The first person in Britain to produce opium was Dr Alston, Professor of Botany and Materia Medica at the University of Edinburgh. He achieved this is the 1730s, using the white poppy because of its large pods, although it was not until 1742 that he published the fact.

From 1763, the Society of Arts began actively to promote the study of medicinal plants, starting with the cultivation of rhubarb and offering a gold medal for new discoveries. Soon the society’s interest turned towards the poppy and opium, prompted by a winner of a 50-guinea prize, John Ball, who produced home-grown opium. Encouraged by Ball’s success and spurred on by a new prize of 50 guineas plus a gold medal for the production of 20 pounds of raw opium, Thomas Jones set 5 acres of ground near Enfield, north of London, in 1794. Despite problems with weeds and inclement weather, he succeeded in 1800 in producing 21 pounds of raw opium and took the prize.

The prize for the development of the medicinal plant went to Dr Howison, an ex-Inspector of Opium from Bengal. In 1813, he stated that a double red garden poppy was suitable for opium production in Scotland, but it was his experiments with the white poppy near London which convinced him commercial opium growing in Britain was feasible. The problems he faced were the fragility of the plant, which could not withstand strong winds, and the care needed in harvesting the pods. Nevertheless, he received the gold medal.

The next major breakthrough came in 1820. John Young, an Edinburgh surgeon and winner of another gold medal, set out to prove opium could be harvested in a cold, damp climate. He succeeded in cultivating poppies which not only gave opium but also oil at a profit of £50–80 per acre. His yield per acre was 56 pounds of opium, several hundred pounds of oil and oil cakes, in addition to a harvest of early potatoes planted between the poppy rows, affording the young plants a protection against the elements. In all, the venture showed a profit of £110 7s 6d.

Not surprisingly, the most successful opium growers were those in the south of England, where the weather was milder. In 1823, Dr John Cowley and a Mr Staines, both of Winslow in Buckinghamshire, received a 30-guinea award from the Society of Arts for ‘143 pounds of opium, of excellent quality, collected by them from about eleven Acres of Land, planted with the Papaver somniferum.’

It was not long before reports came in of other poppy-growing ventures. Poppies were under limited cultivation in most of the southern counties of Britain. In some places, their legacy remains for opium poppies may now be found growing wild on the fringes of Sedgemoor in Somerset and in the countryside around Bridport in Dorset. Most of the growers found a ready local market for their produce for chemists were keen to buy opium at prices well below the market value, without the middleman and duty costs, although how good this opium was is hard to tell because no tests were done to verify the morphine content.

In general, the home-grown opium farmers were part-timers and none saw the poppy as a viable, long-term commercial crop. Indeed, the only successful commercial poppy product was not opium but poppy-heads.

This crop was grown in Mitcham, Surrey and was well-established as early as 1830: the London drug market for poppy-heads obtained the bulk of its supplies from this source. The pods yielded an extract known as ‘English opium’ with a 4 per cent morphine content. A bag of 3000 poppy capsules sold wholesale for about £4 10s 0d.

Poppy growing was never going to be successful on a large scale. The required hours of sunlight were too fickle to guarantee a high opium content, the ground could be too readily waterlogged by summer rains and the growing season, except in the far south of England, was too short.

One rural area of England, however, became synonymous with opium taking, to such an extent it was referred to as ‘the opium district’ and ‘the kingdom of the poppy’. The per capita consumption there was higher than anywhere else in the country. It was the Fens.

The reason for the high consumption of opium is unclear. Possibly, the people in this remote area had grown used to opium over the centuries, having used the wild poppy. On the other hand, local conditions might have prompted its popularity. Before the swamps were fully drained in the mid-1800s, malaria was prevalent and fever common amongst the scattered communities. Although quinine had been discovered and introduced to Europe in the 1640s, it was expensive, at ten times the cost of opium: obviously, the people resorted to the cheaper drug or relied upon herbal brews, including poppies, to reduce malarial fever. The damp climate with bleak winters promoted rheumatism and neuralgia and opium was used to relieve weather-induced illnesses as well as muscular pain brought on by heavy agricultural labouring.

Opium poppies were grown in Fenland gardens to provide herbal cures but most opium was obtained from chemists. Those in the cathedral city of Ely, in the centre of the Fens, sold more opium than any other drug. It was bought as a pill or a thin stick at 1 penny a time, and it was so common a customer had no need to even request it: a penny coin placed on a counter meant only one thing.

In his novel, Alton Locke, published in 1850, the Victorian reformer and novelist, Charles Kingsley, wrote about a Fenman explaining the taking of opium to a stranger:

‘Oh! ho! ho! – you goo into the druggist’s shop o’ market day, into Cambridge, and you’ll see the little boxes, doozens and doozens, a’ready on the counter, and never a venman’s wife goo by, but what calls in for her pennord o’elevation, to last her out the week. Oh! ho! ho! Well it keeps women-folk quiet it do; and it’s mortal good agin the ago pains.’ ‘But what is it?’ ‘Opium, bor’alive, opium!’

A penny’s-worth of ‘elevation’ was not taken merely as a medicine but, as the name implies, to lift its user out of the mire of Fenland mud and the drudgery of agricultural life. In 1863 Dr Henry Julian Hunter, a doctor in the Fens who studied the opium problem, reported: ‘a man may be seen occasionally asleep in a field leaning on his hoe. He starts when approached and works vigorously for a while. A man who is setting about a hard job takes his pill as a preliminary, and many never take their beer without dropping a piece of opium into it.’ Once opium was widely accepted as a medicine, it soon gained popularity as an intoxicant.

Such was the level of local addiction and the popularity of opium as a drink as well as a medicine, sales were always heavy on a Saturday night. At least one Fenland brewer, in Ely, added opium to his ale at source. The local practitioner, Dr Hawkins, reported seeing a King’s Lynn farmer enter a chemist’s shop, order 1½ ounces of laudanum and drink it down there and then. What was more, the man returned twice that day for a similar draught then purchased half a pint to take home for the evening.

The quantity of opium sold in the market towns of the Fens was astonishing. Whittlesea, with a population of 3700, had five chemists dealing primarily in opium whilst a chemist from Spalding testified he sold more laudanum in his four years in the town, to fifty regular customers, than he had in twenty years in another town. A Holbeach chemist took £700–800 a year for laudanum from the working classes of a single parish. Hunter reckoned each chemist sold 200 pounds of opium a year. In 1867, a King’s Lynn chemist declared to Dr Hawkins that he sold 170 pounds of solid opium, 6 gallons of laudanum and 6 of calming cordial for infants in 12 months: from these statistics it was estimated that 50 per cent of Britain’s imported opium was used in the Fens.

In Whittlesea, the local doctor estimated the average consumption for an addict was between 4 and 8 ounces a week and that many were restricted in their habit only by their income. Although opium was comparatively cheap as an occasional medicine, it was a financial burden on the habituated. In 1878, it was published that ‘a poor family will spend eight pence to one shilling per day for opium alone’, this equating to 8–11 per cent of an average labourer’s wage.

In later years, despite the advent of drug legislation, Fenland opium use continued. Although adult usage declined, opium pills were still given to children whilst animals were dosed with veterinary laudanum as late as the 1920s: a government report noted the high number of applications for veterinary opiates which were doubtless being taken by humans. Officialdom turned a blind eye to this, accepting the practice as a ‘local custom’.

The vast quantities of opium consumed in Britain were not used only by the likes of De Quincey or agricultural labourers. Every British person took opium at some time in their lives and many took it frequently.

Opium was, by 1800, long established in medicine. It was employed as a painkiller, a sedative and as a specific against fever and especially diarrhoea. This latter may seem insignificant today but, two centuries ago, diarrhoea was a killer and opium its best cure. Doctors serving with British companies or the military in the East knew of its success rate in the treating of dysentery and cholera, both of which dehydrated the body through diarrhoea. With the British cholera epidemics of 1831—2, 1848—9 and 1853—4, opium was heavily promoted and, mixed with calomel, saved thousands of lives.

The drug acquired the finest of testimonials. It worked. It was not a placebo, as were so many medicines, and it did away with the need for cupping, bleeding and the application of leeches upon which doctors had relied for centuries. By comparison with these crude treatments, opium was also gentle. It produced no inconvenience to the patient, save perhaps mild constipation with prolonged use, and it could be applied as a self-medication. Indeed, it was arguably the first genuine over-the-counter, commercially produced medicine for, until opium was widely available, most self-applied cures were home-brewed concoctions which were passed on either through oral tradition or such publications as Culpeper’s Complete Herbal.

Another promotional point for opium was the common person’s reluctance to visit the doctor. A consultation was expensive and could cost as much as 30 per cent of a skilled worker’s weekly income. In place of the doctor, many visited the chemist who, as a dispenser of drugs, offered cheap advice as part of the sales pitch. It was commonplace for chemists to suggest a treatment, often of their own formulation, which was sold by the penny’s-worth.

The sale of opium in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was akin to the modern-day selling of proprietary medicines in Third World countries. Whereas a modern New Yorker or Londoner goes out and buys a pack of medication, in many poorer countries the packs are split and the contents sold individually with a verbal reading of the dosage. Patients purchase only what they can afford and need.

Laudanum was immensely popular yet other mixtures were just as favoured and became so widespread as to be included in the pharmacopoeia. One opium-based liquid was camphorated tincture of opium known as ‘paregoric’, the name deriving from the Greek for ‘consoling’ or ‘calming’: another was Battley’s Sedative Solution, officially called liquor opii sedativus, containing calcium hydrate, opium, sherry, alcohol and distilled water.

An indication of the chemist’s position in the treatment of everyday ailments can be gained from one London East End chemist who, in 1868, reported a Saturday morning income, in just three and a half hours, consisting of 209 penny customers, 12 one-shilling customers and over three shillings in patent-medicine sales. Most of this trade would have been in opium-containing preparations.

In 1857, the Sale of Poisons Bill addressed the issue of the sale of opiates with the intention of controlling it but it was debated whether such control was beyond enforcement due to such widespread use. Professor Brade of the Royal Institution commented,… ‘there are a number of persons who are in the habit of keeping laudanum by them: they take 10 or 20 drops … when their bowels get out of order, or when they are apprehensive of cholera’, whilst a Bristol magistrate pointed out a chemist could not be expected to keep opium under lock and key because he dispensed it at a rate of at least 100 times a day.

In time, not only chemists sold opium – so too did grocers and co-operative stores, rural general stores, booksellers and travelling peddlers. At a retail price of 1 penny for a third of an ounce, it was a bargain.

Another form of self-medication was the patent medicines. These were liable to a 12 per cent stamp-duty tax on the retail price but this did not diminish their popularity which soared throughout the nineteenth century, prompted by lavish claims in the new art of advertising. Chemists were quick to ride the patent-medicine bandwagon, offering their own similar brews at a lower price, undercutting the cost of tax and advertising. Many were harmless, coloured, sugar syrups but, needless to say, a good many contained more toxic substances such as strychnine, prussic acid, aconite and opium.

Dover’s Powder was famous as a patent medicine but the most famous – which survives to the present day, although it no longer contains the drug in anything like the quantity it did – was Dr J. Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne. It was invented as a cholera remedy by an Indian army doctor who sold the formula to a pharmaceutical manufacturer. It was marketed as a cure for a wide range of common ailments but it is best known today as a cure for diarrhoea. The original contained 2 grains of morphine (as hydrochlorate of morphia) per fluid ounce added to chloroform and tincture of cannabis: the modern version, now called J. Collis Browne’s Mixture, consists of 1 milligram of morphine anhydrous in every 5 millilitre dose with peppermint oil in a base of ethanol and caramel which gives it an authentic opium-brown colouring. Needless to say, chlorodyne produced addicts and it was not unknown as a vehicle for suicide, murder and accidental lethal overdose. Despite its risks, chlorodyne and similar medicines were a godsend. In Britain alone, they saved countless adults and children from death by dysentery and cholera, diseases which were inevitable in the crowded, unsanitary cities where food was contaminated and sewers at best rudimentary.

Yet opium did more than save lives: it provided an escape from the miseries and vicissitudes of working-class life. Men reverted to it to calm their fears of insecurity and poverty, to kill memories of long hours at the loom, the coal face or the plough. Women took it to numb the grinding poverty in which they lived and worked, struggling to raise a family and feed a husband.

People were introduced to opium quite literally as soon as they left their mother’s breast, and possibly before.

Although there were a large number of baby-calming liquids on the market – including home-made recipes such as poppy-head tea – the most famous of all was Godfrey’s Cordial, a soothing syrup for babies which reduced colic and consisted of tincture of opium in a thick sugar syrup to disguise the bitter taste. Sales were astronomical. In 1808, a Nottingham chemist reported selling 600 pints a year whilst, in Coventry in 1862, it was estimated 12,000 doses were given a week. In Long Sutton, Lincolnshire, a chemist claimed to sell 25½ gallons a year to a population of 6000 – and he was not the town’s sole chemist.

The ‘comfort’, as Godfrey’s Cordial was colloquially known, had its competitors, the main ones being Mrs Winslow’s Soothing Syrup – a popular sedative for babies throughout Europe and America which contained up to 1 grain of morphine per fluid ounce – Street’s Infants’ Quietness and Atkinson’s Infants’ Preservative.

Victorian baby preparations were sold to all classes, although they were primarily bought by the poor. Not only mothers purchased them for their fractious offspring. Baby-minders bought them in large quantities.

Wages amongst lower-class workers were low and both parents frequently worked at menial or physically demanding jobs for long periods. Babies, an inevitable product of poverty, were a hindrance. Infanticide was not uncommon but most infants, their mothers employed as domestic servants, in factories or in agricultural gangs, ended up in the hands of child-minders who charged about 3s a week (20 per cent of an average wage) to look after a child. The minders were most often in control of up to a dozen babies and were not only notoriously lax but they might also have had a second home job as well – say as a laundry-woman. To keep their charges quiet, they fed them soothing syrups: in this way, many children in poor areas were not only habituated to opium but spent much of their time in a semi-comatose state. What compounded the problem was that, when the mother returned from an exhausting day, she too dosed the child so she could get an uninterrupted night’s rest.

There was another convenient side-effect. Opium suppresses appetite so young children were less likely to be hungry and a strain on the already tight domestic budget. Inevitably, these children were frequently undernourished and in continual poor health, with a characteristic yellowish pallor to their skin. By the age of three or four many were, as one observer wrote, ‘shrank up into little old men or wizened like a little monkey’. When they grew older, few of these children were able to benefit from even the modicum of education available to them and they ended up providing the next generation of the working class, illiterate and condemned to a cycle of poverty and opium use.

The accidental lethal poisoning of children was not infrequent: opium was also used by despairing mothers to kill their own children, especially bastards. Certainly, it was used to murder infants in the infamous Victorian baby-farms and work-houses.

A poisoning inquest in Liverpool in 1876 sums up the situation and the ambivalence of most people’s attitudes towards infant mortality and murder. It outlined the case of a mother, who took at least an ounce of opium a week, whose two-day-old infant died from opium poisoning. The doctor attending the death put it down to opium taken through the breast in the mother’s milk. A more plausible explanation is the mother killed the infant in despair at having the responsibility of a child. The jury accepted the doctor’s explanation and the husband was cautioned to control his wife’s opium consumption. Such a verdict was common. Few doctors would have been willing to certify a cause of death which would implicate another member of his profession or undermine the use of opium. The attitude of many juries, comprised of common folk who knew full well what was going on, was that the death of a child, whilst to be pitied, was a mercy in disguise, an escape from the oppression of poverty or working-class life.

For adults, opium provided more than a quiet child. It was used widely by London dockland prostitutes who drugged their clients with it so they might rob them: they also took it to counteract the misery of their profession, as a relief from muscular pains after a long night’s work and to counteract the symptoms of venereal disease. It is not inconceivable to think De Quincey was introduced to opium by his prostitute companion who would surely have been familiar with it. On occasion, opium was used as an intoxicant but this was not common. In the north of England particularly, drunkards took laudanum or opium pills as an occasional alternative to alcohol but in general, gin and ale were the usual tipple, being cheaper. Where laudanum drunks existed, the start of what has become a major undermining of late twentieth-century society occurred – drugs-related crimes began to appear on the records of magistrates’ courts, concerning addicts stealing to support their habits.

It must be added that not all opium users, even frequent or chronic ones, were detrimentally habituated. Many cases were documented of people in their eighties and even nineties who were regular, even heavy users, but who remained in good health, apart from a tendency to become constipated and with the characteristic creamy-yellow complexion.

Despite all the signs of opium’s potential for evil, addiction still aroused little public interest. For the average Victorian, opium taking was as much a part of society as the drinking of alcohol or the smoking of tobacco. Indeed, opium was more widely available in 1870 than tobacco was in 1970: and, like tobacco in the present day, it was primarily purchased by the poor and lower classes, contemporary studies showing the deeper the poverty, the greater the desire to buy opium.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, opium was seldom regarded by either the public or the medical profession as a problem although, very occasionally, concern was shown. When, in 1828, the Earl of Mar died, an investigation found he had been eating opium for thirty years, once telling his housekeeper he consumed 49 grains of solid opium and an ounce of laudanum a day. On hearing this, his insurers refused to honour his life insurance, contending his habit affected his life expectancy. A few years later, a Professor Christison of Edinburgh concluded to a Scottish court that opium-eating shortened life.

The premise that opiates were harmless began to be eroded from the 1830s, the availability of drugs worrying those members of the newly evolving public health movement as well as doctors in what was becoming a well-defined medical profession with new standards and ethics. Opium became a medical matter and, as a result of a number of inquiries, was regarded by the 1860s as a social and medical problem to be considered with other poisons, addiction becoming regarded as chronic poisoning. Mortality statistics started to register opium as a cause of death. In 1860, a third of all fatal poisonings were due to opiates and casual overdosing was so common that domestic health publications gave instructions for dealing with poisoning.

The main reason for so many accidental overdosings was the unreliable strength of opium mixtures, the non-standardisation of doses and the uneven levels of adulteration: laudanum from one druggist could be very much stronger than that from another. In addition, habitual users frequently misjudged the limits of their tolerance. Opiates also accounted for the majority of suicides throughout the nineteenth century and, although no statistics exist for criminal poisonings, laudanum was sufficiently prevalent in murders as to warrant being mentioned in the Offences Against the Person Act of 1861.

Mortality statistics gathered by the Registrar General’s office caused the medical profession to press for the restriction of opiate availability on public health grounds. The statistics were also good propaganda for the growing public health movement, with infant mortality as the campaigners’ central pivot. The Ladies’ Sanitary Association published penny tracts with such dramatic titles as The Massacre of Innocents which condemned the use of soothing syrups by the poor. There was more than a hint of class consciousness in these tracts: the middle-class ladies who distributed them had little knowledge of the plight of the poor and conveniently overlooked the fact many middle-class children were also soothed with opiates.

The matter of doping infants regularly appeared in the medical press and it was debated in Parliament. Yet articles and parliamentary discussions, although they touched upon adult addiction, again only dealt with the working classes. Middle- and upper-class opium usage was either ignored or tolerated. Only the temperance movement addressed the problem across the classes, and then only in passing, allying the problem to alcoholism which was considered more prevalent in the workers.

It was generally believed that the way to combat the problem was to reduce the availability of opium and, in 1868, the first steps were made to control opiates. The 1868 Poisons and Pharmacy Act brought together the interests of legislators, doctors and pharmacists after several previous attempts at legislation had failed. The act, which listed opium and its preparations amongst a total of fifteen poisons, restricted who could sell opium and how they might do it: however, it carried no serious penalties for contravention and the concept that a law could illegalise a substance and prohibit its use or possession was far off into the future. Nevertheless, as the supply of opiates became increasingly limited, they started to acquire the enchantment of forbidden fruit with which dangerous ensorcellment they have been associated ever since.

Although registered doctors could dispense opiates under the act, chemists were appointed the only purveyors of poisons and therefore of opium, the details of every sale being recorded in a poisons register. All containers had to be clearly labelled ‘poison’, the skull-and-crossbones symbol coming into use. In effect, the restrictions were not at all stringent and hard to enforce but there was a small decline in the mortality statistics, with a distinct dip in infant mortality which dropped to a third of the pre-act total by 1880. Yet by 1900, the overall opium death rate remained at the same level as prior to 1868.

One hole in the act was that patent medicines containing opium were not covered. Inevitably, their sales soared as the act started to bite and a new campaign against these began amongst doctors in the 1880s, criticism of the opium trade which was being carried on with China adding to the climate of opinion in favour of further opium regulation. The main force of the attack was against chlorodyne – Dr J. Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne alone earned its makers £31,000 in 1891. The next year, legislation brought patent opiate medicines under the umbrella of the 1868 act: sales from Dr J. Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne fell slightly to £25,000 by 1899.

The new legislation was quickly turned to advantage by the patent medicine industry which continued to market its brands but without an opiate content. Surveys by the British Medical Association in 1909 and 1912 discovered that most remedies were free of opium, the makers keenly advertising the fact. Liquifruita Medica gives a good example, its advertising claiming it was ‘free of poison, laudanum, copper solution, cocaine, morphia, opium, chloral, calomel, paregoric, narcotics or preservatives’. Quite what good it might do was not questioned: many former opiate medicines were now little more than syrups laced with foul-tasting herbs. The common dictum was the worse it tasted, the more good it must do.

By the end of the nineteenth century, opium was firmly in the domain of the doctor rather than the kitchen cupboard and, with new specific drugs being developed, it was no longer needed as a cure-all. Opiates became controlled substances, improvements in the medical profession reduced the degree of self-medication and opiates were prescribed for a more limited range of illnesses than before.

Yet, by now, opium’s throne was under threat. Where opium itself had ruled in the past, its crown was being passed to its stronger, more powerful and seemingly more miraculous constituent parts.