Opium (10 page)

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.