Victorian England popular&legal drugs (hashish, opium, absinthe and Chloral)

Victorian England, spanning roughly the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901), is characterized in popular understanding as a time of personal and family values. The codification of the notion of values developed into specific and detailed ideas about social and cultural propriety and restraint. The very term "Victorian" has come to be used in our own time by cultural conservatives who look to the reign of Victoria as a touchstone for their own desires about social order. Prudishness, excessive formality, and repression, it is popularly assumed, characterized Victorian culture.

At the same time that Victorian England was reigning in social behavior, it realized incredible expansion in terms of wealth, power, and influence. Science and technology including the study of natural laws and biology were rapidly advancing. Spiritual matters, particularly the role of institutional religion, were beginning to be questioned in accordance with a continued emphasis on rational thought. Under the influence of individuals such as Marx, Freud and Darwin, Victorian England became innovative in its views of ideology, politics, democracy, socialism, unionization, women's rights, and other social movements.

However, a dark side to Victorian society existed, in part as a reaction to the emphasis on restraint of pleasure and social propriety. Victorian society saw a rampant, though covert, use and abuse of drugs and alcohol. Developments in medicine and science made drugs such as heroin, chloral, and laudanum available and widely prescribed. Often the result was addiction. In addition, the expansion of the British Empire and developments in trade relations brought other drugs and drug derivatives into Great Britain, in particular opium from Asia. Alcohol, always present in society, was more easily produced and distributed with continued industrialization.

The rise of a middle class with expendable incomes made access to such substances even easier. It must be noted that the most popular of drugs used, those listed here, are all barbiturates, depressants, suggesting perhaps a high level of frustration with and desire to escape the repressive strictures under which Victorians found themselves living.

Denial, always a popular abstraction in a culture advocating repression, served to keep drug (ab)use covert, suggesting that perhaps there was little or no use of illicit substances in the British isles. Furthermore, Britain's view of its moral imperative in its imperial activities allowed it to place the blame for any drug problems on the influence of foreign habits and foreign peoples in the land.

Alcohol

Despite Victorian values of moderation and propriety, despite the attempts of temperance movements, and despite the cultural value placed on teetotaling, alcohol consumption became a popular pastime, and brewing and distillation grew to be thriving industries throughout the 19th century. Custom and habit, often combined with a hard, controlled, and monotonous life, led to excessive drinking of hard liquor. Spirits were distributed freely to anyone who could afford to buy-and no one was exempt; neither women, children, clergy nor the elite. By the 17th and 18th centuries, home distilleries had become popular, and thus by Victoria's reign, spirits had become the everyday drink for less wealthy people. Whereas the bourgeoisie was ostensibly striving for moderation, laborers commonly used spirits to flee from their desolate everyday lives.

Victorians so valued controlled, propitious behavior that they imposed various techniques in order to encourage social enforcement of standards of behavior. The use of the pillory for drunks and other social deviants was used until it was abolished in 1837, the start of Victoria's reign. It was soon replaced, however, by blacklisting in local newspapers. By the mid 19th century local newspapers were widely published and read, and nearly all of them included a column on the events happening in the local police station. Public intoxication, regarded as anti-social behavior, appeared as the most common crime reported. Having one's inebriated behavior announced publicly was further exacerbated by that fact that drunkenness, and the related loss of self-control, was associated with the lower classes. Though the threat of having one's misdemeanors brought to the attention of the reading public was very real; it essentially failed to curb the consumption of alcohol.

Victorian society did provide a space fo acceptable drinking of alcoholic beverages. Social drinking, in moderation of course, functioned as a typical activity for the middle and upper classes during meals and social engagements. Furthermore, alcohol, specifically beverages such beer, brandy, gin, and absinthe, gained legitimacy as medical treatments. Victorian physicians commonly prescribed these alcoholic beverages to alleviate a host of ailments, among them epilepsy, gout, kidney stones, colic, fever, and headaches.


The participation of many Victorian intellectuals in a culture of drugs and alcohol shows that they were well aware that anesthetics could be used for exploring new kinds of aesthetic experience. Aestheticism itself derived much of its force from the daring claim to be turning the analysis of the experience of beauty into a kind of vivisection of oneself, as in Oscar Wilde's novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.The darker side of this experimentation was brought out in science fiction depicting chemical and vivisectional exploration run amok, as in Robert Louis Stevenson's novel, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, where Jekyll buys a house once belonging to a "celebrated surgeon" and, "his own tastes being rather chemical than anatomical" turns the former dissecting rooms into a laboratory for self-experimentation (chapter 5). The effect of substance abuse also had an impact on the writings of the Brontë sisters who reacted to their brother Branwell's alcoholism. Emily's novel, Wuthering Heights presents new models of familial relationships, and Anne'snovel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall directly tackles the issue of alcohol abuse and the passage of such patterns of behavior within families. Similarly, Thomas Hardy's novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge depicts the effects of alcoholism on the family.

Hashish

Active interest in hashish resulted from a general growth of awareness about the Orient. The early nineteenth century saw the beginning of much European travel to lands that were about to be absorbed into empire, particularly India and the Middle East. Anything from the Orient that was novel or different - food, clothing, furniture, architecture, or experience - was quickly taken up by Western Europeans and popularized.

It wasn't enough for the British Empire to merely abscond land from the East, but customs and objects were appropriated as well, accounting in part for the attraction of hashish. When first brought to the West, hashish was usually eaten rather than smoked, due to misconceptions on the part of travelers. Cannabis had long been grown in Europe as a textile crop, but as an intoxicant it was a fresh, new idea. It was not considered likely to become the resort of nervous elderly ladies (as was laudanum) or the laboring poor (in the case of alcohol), and so it grew fashionable and was limited to a self-selecting group of initiates.

Although the English were aware that hemp preparations of all sorts had been widely used in their Indian possessions for thousands of years, written accounts of experiences with hashish are generally divided between French and American writers.* There is speculation, however, that Alfred Lord Tennyson's famous poem, "The Lotus Eaters" in which he praises "slumber" over "toil," refers to the "exotic" consumption of hashish by Arabs. This assumption seems probable if one considers Victorian writer William Holman Hunt's comparison of hashish smokers to the race of people described in Tennyson's poem.
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Opium

Numerous archeological finds point to the fact that opium has been the drug of choice for many civilizations, beginning with some of the oldest ones we are familiar with. The Sumerians, who referred to the plant as "Hul Gil," the "joy plant," apparently recognized its euphoric effects and passed it onto Assyrians. From them, it went on to Babylonians, who further passed their knowledge to Egyptians. The Egyptians spread the word and the plant across their merchant routes, which included the Phoenicians and Minoans, who inadvertently exposed Carthage, Greece, and the rest of Europe to the drug. The Greeks proceeded not only to cultivate, but also to trade the drug. An additional Greek contribution was to the development of technology that would assure required precision, and therefore highest quality of product, in the critical part of opium production — the first surgically sharp knives for opium culling. Hypocrates, "the father of medicine," acknowledged the sedative, but dismissed the curative effects of opium.

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With the Greeks of Alexander the Great, opium travelled to Asia and north Africa. From there, the Arab merchants took it to China, where it found a fertile growing ground. During the period of strong influence of the Catholic church in the Middle Ages, and denouncement of everything and anything "eastern" as "devil's work" opium's destiny is rarely mentioned in writing. However, as soon as the Portuguese mercantile maritime quests start frequenting China's east coast, opium smoking is taken up again. While opium smoking in China never spread beyond the lowest classes at that point, being a "barbaric habit," Europeans gladly re-adopted the effects that it brings, introducing opium into medical practice in the form of laudanum, first concocted by the Swiss alchemist-physician Paracelsus. The "stones of immortality" in the shape of little black pills contained opium, citrus juice, and gold, and were prescribed as painkillers. Portuguese merchants reminded all places they proceeded to visit, like Persia and India, of opium, introducing these nations to its recreational uses. While carrying their cargoes of Indian opium through the Portuguese colony of Macao, it was physically easy to redirect the trade flow into China as well.

Opium has travelled a long way, physically and in social ideologies, from one of the "exotic" psychoactive substances-turned-luxury items (like caffeine, tea, or nicotine), to becoming a commodity of mass consumption.

In 1606, the ships chartered by QueenElizabeth I were first instructed to transport the finest opium from India back to England, although the Isles first encountered some form of the chemical during Roman rule. In 1680, an English apothecary, Thomas Sydenham, introducesSydenham's Laudanum, a compound of opium containing sherry wine and herbs. Its potency as a pain killer makes it a popular remedy for many ailments. At the same time, the use of opium in China is spreading, as the Dutch merchants introduce the use of pipe for opium–smoking.

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In response to the looming epidemic of opiumaddiction, ChineseEmperor, Yung Cheng, bans opium smoking and its domestic sale in 1729,except for medicinal use. This one and the following attempts of theChinese rulers to curb illicit opium use will continue to be challengedfor years (or centuries) by British trade interests. Starting from 1750when British East India Company took control of Bengal and Bihar, the mainopium—producing areas in India, British import of opium into Chinawas ever—inflating. In 1767, the number of chests imported illegallyreached two thousand a year.

By 1793 the British East India Company managesto establish a monopoly on the opium trade, prohibiting all poppy growersin India from selling opium to any of the competitor trading companies. Bybuying a "license" to grow opium, however, the poppy farmers were notgaining the right to be protected from competition, but rather learnedthat they would be punished if they didn’t produce as much opium asthemonopolist expected.

China's emperor Kia King, responding to adrastic increase in opium use in China, issues an edict forbidding opium, which falls short of being enforced in the shadow of Britain's mercantile marines. By 1800, the British Levant company is purchasing nearly half of all the opium coming from Smyrna, a Turkish city in Asia Minor, strictly for importation into Europe and the United States.

In 1803, German physician Friedrich Sertuernerfrom Paderborn discovers the active ingredient of opium — morphine — bydissolving it in acid and neutralizing it with ammonia. European physicians already celebrate opium as "God's own medicine" for its reliability andlong-lasting effects. American merchants join in the opium trade, smuggling the contraband item from Turkey to China, or buying it from the British, and trying to resell it to the Chinese. In a telling reversal, John Jacob of New York City gave up smuggling from Turkey to China in 1816 to dedicate his American Fur(?!) Company exclusively to sales to England.

The early nineteenth century sees the firstmention of opium by English literary figures like John Keats and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, associated with the period of Romanticism. Coleridge openly talks about his use of laudanum, as a sedative used to alleviate his stomach pain,but also as a recreational drug. Thomas DeQuincey's "Confessions of anEnglish Opium-Eater" detail his pleasures and pains coming from opium use which he initially justifies as the only resort he had to soothe his unbearable stomach pain. However, DeQuincey's accounts of the pros and cons of laudanum addiction also credit opium with an incomparable power to inspire, enlighten, and expand intellectual and sensual abilities.

Only seven years before Queen Victoriainherited the throne at age 18, the British use of opium reached an alltime high — as many as 22,000 pounds of opium were imported from Turkey and India in 1830.

Victorian attitudes toward drug use andaddiction, and opium addiction in particular, are hard to relate to our present view of substance (ab)use, as our knowledge of the impact of drugs, our physiological responses to drug use, and potential risks are incomparably moreextensive than they were in the late nineteenth century. The second part of the 1900s were in fact a time of both scientific and personal experimentation with drugs. The scientific knowledge of drugs at thetime did not look into (or sometimes even think about) the detrimental sides of opium use, like addiction or dysfunction, but primarily on the mitigation of suffering from incurable illnesses. Recreationally, opium (or laudanum) was the affordable and the simple path to pleasure much needed at the end of a work week that spanned in excess an unfathomable 120 hours.

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It would be inaccurate to say that the Britishgovernment was not aware of the addictive nature of opium atthe time when it was becoming the most widely used means of improving thequality of life for masses of working people. Not only had opium beenbanned because of its deleterious effects in China years before the reignof Queen Victoria; it was also a well-known fact that it was primarily theBritish traders who were pushing it in order to reduce the budget deficitcoming out of the tea trade with China, backed by the power of Britishroyal fleet.

In a showdown that would decide the history ofdrug use all over the world today, only two years after Queen Victoriainherited the throne, British trade interests in the Chinese opium market were defended in a series of Opium Wars, the first one of which started after China persisted in its intention to uproot opium use by bridling the British drug trafficking that had decimated the Chinese work force and created entire generations of drug-addicts. These wars were an indication not only of the undeniable strength of the British state at the time, but also of the inextricable link between economy and politics, and the complete split of moral standards in any imperialist agenda.

Opium Wars

Following years of dealing with "malleable"Chinese government officials willing to keep their eyes closed at the British ships unloading their contraband in the open port of Canton (helped by "hong" merchants, a monopolistic group of Chinese merchants who provided vast sums to bribe Chinese officials), year 1839 saw Lin Tse-Hu, the imperial commissioner, in charge of the situation. Lin was put in charge of curbing opium trade, and preventing the spread of ubiquitous opium-addiction in China after the Emperor's son died of an overdose.

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After initial success in his efforts, Linwrote a letter toQueen Victoria (which she allegedly never read), pointing to thereasons for banning of opium in China,and explicating the legal and ethical rationale behind the anti-opiummeasures of the Chinese government. The measures that included confiscating British goods and subjection of British citizens to Chinese criminal laws implied equality in political terms between China and England. One of the main parts of Lin's arguments points to the double standard England has used in opium trade with China.

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Inresponse to confiscations of opium and executions of British subjects, the Royal fleet launched Opium Wars  in order to preserve precisely that double standard and prove its military and economic supremacy. The victory that came out of this advantage translated into a political submission of China under the treatyof Nanking after the first Opium War, whereby Hong Kong  was ceded to the British Empire "in perpetuity," and England established as "the most favored nation" trading with China through five of the newly opened ports. After the Second Opium War, the Chinese imperial government was further humiliated by provisions that allowed complete legalization of opium and free and unrestricted propagation of Christianity all over China.

Opium for Victorian England

Opium use didn't produce as much resistance asalcohol, or incite the interest of the temperance movement until very latein the nineteenth century when it became obvious that permissivenesstowards drugs and double standards in international trade opened manyethical questions for the government.

With opium and other drugs becoming globalcommodities and the pharmaceutical industry making opiates the drugs ofmass abuse in big European and American cities, an estimated 5 out of 6 working class English families used opium on a regular basis in Victorian England. With alcoholism denounced as one of the most notable sins of the lower classes looking for an escape from a dreary existence, opium’s effects were actually preferred because it never produced the aggression or the violence that were usually associated with alcohol.

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Opium was easy to come by--physicians dispensed opiates directly to patients or wrote prescriptions for them, and pharmacists sold them over the counter. There were numerous items of patent medication containing opium or morphine as well. Godfrey's Cordial was particularly popular in England, where it was sold by the thousands of bottles, and administered not only to adults, but to infants and toddlers as well. Even Marx reported in Capital about the English habit of"dosing their babies" with opium.

While the medicinal use of opiates was perfectly acceptable in Victorian times, the "social," recreational use was borderline respectable, although it was legal for a long time. Of course, it was always hard to tell where the medicinal use would cross over into the field of recreation, particularly with the issue of class bearing upon availability of alternative forms of "entertainment."

In 1873, an English physician noted:

...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 whose 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 Norfolkand 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 saying 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.

Pharmaceutical research and investment into opiate drugs as the most effective pain killers brought about opium derivatives, like heroin, whose use still hasn't diminished, but whose social contextualization and acceptability have in the meantime completely changed.

For a person from a non-working class, where "keeping up appearances" was order of the day, opium consumption was a less conspicuous and still a legal way to indulge in a break away from Victorian binds that prescribed an unfaltering strength of will and constant sobriety for every individual in society. The necessity of a split between public images of sensible, responsible British citizens and unaccountable drug users created a culture of opium dens - like the one frequented by Sherlock Holmes - in which the mask of decency and sobriety could be shaken off away from the public eye.

The "oriental" element was accused of badly influencing the moral British society, further disseminating prejudice and partial representations of Asians, while diminishing the role of England itself in its own infliction.

Numerous Victorian literary works and authors, who usually came from environments that didn't make their living working for wages, dealt with opiates whose function was sometimes medicinal, but frequently also was a way to re-vivify imagination or relocate into a world more colorful than Victorian England.

Alfred Lord Tennyson’s  less-famous brother Charles was an opium addict, and his wife Louisa (the sister of Alfred’s wife) suffered from a nervous collapse after years of trying to help Charles get over his addiction.There is speculation that Charles’s problem of opium was so debilitating that rather than inspiring him, it prevented him from becoming a more prolific writer. His poem "Silkworms and Spiders"  alludes to the "web" of drug addiction and the opium-induced "trance" which is "deadly-deep." The style of decadence and aestheticism which characterized the end of the nineteenth century as well as the end of the Victorian era was fraught with languorous images alluding to opium use. Oscar Wilde, reputed to be an opium smoker, details this decadent lifestyle in The Picture of Dorian Gray. In the novel, Dorian epitomizes the British literary dandy whose haunts include opium dens tucked away in the dark corners of London streets. Opium is also widely believed to have provided inspiration for LewisCarroll’s hallucinatory images in his popular book Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland.

Absinthe

Absinthe, known as the "cocaine of the 19th century," was a distilled liquor made with the additive wormwood. Wormwood, when combined with alcohol becomes a narcotic producing a variety of disturbing physical and mental problems. Known as "the green fairy," "the plague," "the enemy," and "the queen of poisons," absinthe caused great social problems partly because it became associated with inspiration and freedom and became a symbol of decadence--characteristics counter to Victorian sensibility and propriety.

According to those familiar with the drink, absinthe can produce euphoria without drunkenness, a heightening of the senses, and, in general, an effect similar to that produced by opium or cocaine. Over indulgence in the drink, however, can result in addiction, after which one can expect rapid mental and physical deterioration. The most dangerous ingredient in absinthe is the potent, bitter oil which is extracted from the wormwood and which contains the narcotic thujone.

Wormwood was believed to be beneficial when used for medicinal purposes. The plants could allegedly drive sickness from the body, enhance fertility in barren women, break up gallstones, restore the memory, prevent tiredness, and ward off dangerous animals. It was prescribed for various ailments, among them menstrual pains, anemia, and rheumatism. Wormwood was also reputed to prevent lice and to act as an antidote to poisonous fungi, to hemlock, and to bites of certain poisonous reptiles.

Absinthe, unlike the more popular beer, was relatively expensive and its use was restricted to the middle class and to certain artistic groups, where, it is reported, its hallucinatory effects were much appreciated. Literary men and artists were particularly drawn to the drink, believing that it would inspire them with new ideas and add fuel to the creative process. An additional attraction of the drink was the prevailing belief that it was an aphrodisiac that would stimulate sexual appetites and increase sexual enjoyment.

Though absinthe achieved greatest popularity among the French and the Swiss, many prominent English writers were fans of its narcotic properties, among them playwright William Shakespeare and diarist Samuel Pepys from Tudor England, and novelist Oscar Wilde and poet Ernest Christopher Dowson from the Victorian period. In 1897, after a period of excessive drinking, Dowson wrote a poem entitled "Absinthia Taetra," which describes the absinthe drinker's futile attempt to escape the pain and humiliation of past memories and to experience some degree of peace.

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Not all Victorian artists were fans of absinthe. Victorian novelist Marie Corelli was so concerned about the growing number of absinthe drinkers in England and Europe that she wrote a novel on the subject entitled Wormwood, published in 1890. The main character, Gaston Beauvois, is addicted to absinthe, and frequently refers to the drink as the "fairy with the green eyes." He states, "Let me be mad . . . mad with the madness of absinthe, the wildest most luxurious madness in the world."

Chloral Hydrate

First synthesized in 1832, chloral hydrate was the first depressant developed for the specific purpose of inducing sleep. Currently marketed as syrups or soft gelatin capsules, chloral hydrate takes effect in a relatively short time (about 30 minutes) and will induce sleep in an hour. In Victorian England, a solution of chloral and alcohol constituted the infamous "knockout drops" or "Mickey Finn."

Today depressants such as chloral hydrate are packaged with labels warning against the danger of mixing these kinds of sedatives with alcohol or other depressants. We now know that a mixture of morphine and alcohol, for example, is likely to bring about an episode of psychosis in the user, and morphine mixed with valium is such a deadly combination that it is sometimes used to euthanize critically ill patients.

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In the nineteenth century, however, chloral hydrate was often used by alcoholics whose sleep patterns had become disturbed by excessive drinking. The danger of such a potent mixture and the highly addictive properties of chloral resulted in "two cravings for a single craving," as detailed in 1880 in the  Quarterly  Journal of Inebriety. At the end of the century, the medical community was finally becoming aware of the problems associated with the increasing popularity of hypnotic drugs such as chloral hydrate.

Chloral hydrate, like several other nineteenth-century depressants, found eager users among the literary and artistic community of Victorian England. Poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti (in the picture) became a virtual recluse after his wife Elizabeth Siddal died of a laudanum overdose, and his grief and guilt led to a debilitating addiction to chloral hydrate, which lasted until his death in 1882. Writer W.E. Henley's 1875 poem  "Interior" from his series "In Hospital," paints a grim picture of the use of chloral as a sedative agent frequently administered to dying patients by health-care workers.

Despite the abuse and mis-administration of the sedative, chloral hydrate did fulfill a need for a drug that would ease sleeplessness due to pain or insomnia and is considered a positive medical discovery. At therapeutic doses (and without the introduction of alcohol and other depressants), chloral produces few negative side effects and is competent in promoting sleep. Although chloral hydrate is still encountered today, its use has declined with the introduction of other barbiturates.