Opium (11 page)

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.

5

Heroic Substances

Early in the eighteenth century, pharmacists and physicians began to hunt for the core substances of opium which produced its miraculous properties. There was an awareness – arrived at as much by guesswork as by scientific analysis – of there being what was called the ‘basic principle' of opium, otherwise referred to as its ‘essence': Rousseau's ‘Black Drop', having three times the potency of any other opium mixture, was considered to have a super-abundance of this elusive compound, yet what it was was unknown and, as doctors were always requesting even stronger potions, there was created a growing demand for the knowledge. It was believed that, if this substance could be isolated, the potency of opium could be vastly increased by getting rid of the ineffective material in its make-up. It goes without saying the financial rewards of discovery were an added incentive.

Of course, what the hunters did not realise was they were drawing inexorably closer to the discovery of the alkaloids of opium, the organic chemical compounds at its very heart.

Several men worked independently to investigate the poppy and its products, one of the earliest being an American, John Leigh of Virginia, who published his
Experimental inquiry into the properties of opium
in 1786. Seventeen years later, a French pharmacist called Derosne succeeded in separating out a salt from opium which, in experiments on animals, proved to be more powerful than raw opium. He promptly announced he had discovered opium's essence, publishing his findings in the
Annales de Chimie
in February 1804, and immodestly naming the salt
‘Sel narcotique de Derosne'.
Not surprisingly, it quickly gained popularity as a medicine.

What Derosne had discovered was one of opium's constituent parts, a substance today known as noscapine (formerly called narcotine), although his was not a pure sample.

In December 1804 another French chemist, Armand Seguin, presented a paper, entitled
‘Sur l'opium',
to the Institut de France, in which he outlined a technique for obtaining another substance from opium. His discovery was not published for a decade, by which time he was in disgrace for embezzling drug supplies from the French army, and his work was dismissed. Seguin did not know it but he was on the trail of one of the most far-reaching medical discoveries of all time.

The first real breakthrough is generally credited to a 21-year-old German pharmacist's assistant from Paderborn in Westphalia, Friedrich Wilhelm Adam Sertürner. Born in Neuhaus in June 1783, he received no scientific education or training but he was apprenticed to a pharmacist for five years. Although his laboratory equipment was inadequate and rudimentary, his patience and precise scientific observation were not and, curious about opium, he spent much of his spare time investigating it. Working initially in Paderborn and later at Einbeck in Hanover, he was to alter the future of medicine. His painstaking experimentation has saved millions of lives: it might also be argued to have instigated the scourge of modern society.