Addiction and Opiates

CHAPTER 9 THE PROBLEM IN THE UNITED STATES DURING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
prostitutes because of the drug. The principal stress was placed upon the vice of opium eating among the respectable
classes rather than among criminals. W. R. Cobbe said in 1895 that those who drank laudanum, swallowed gum or
powdered opium, or used morphine were for the most part intelligent and respectable members of society. He also
pointed out that they purchased their supplies of the drug openly and legally in the drugstores .(5)
Surveys conducted before the passing of the Harrison Act in 1914 invariably indicated that women addicts
outnumbered men by about three to two. For example, in 1878 Orville Marshall found that 62.2 per cent of a sample of
1,313 cases in Michigan were women, (6) and L. P. Brown in 1914 found 66.9 per cent of a group of 2,370 Tennessee
addicts to be women .(7) Current statistics based upon samples obtained from law enforcement agencies always show
a vast preponderance of males. Other portions of the population in which the incidence of addiction was relatively
high, and probably still is, were ex-soldiers and the medical and allied professions.
Addicts experienced no difficulty in obtaining their drugs in those days; in fact, narcotics were almost forced upon
them. Not only did the drugstores sell the supplies cheaply and openly, but all kinds of opiatecontaining patent
medicines were advertised. Thus the addict of the nineteenth century had unlimited sources of supply. He could buy
paregoric, laudanum, tincture of opium, morphine, Winslow's Soothing Syrup, Godfrey's Cordial, McMunn's Elixir of
Opium, or many other preparations. For a few cents a day he could keep himself loaded. He could even obtain opium
by purchasing the so-called cures, widely promoted during the period. Virtually all such remedies contained opiates
and were merely examples of quackery.
A narcotics user once flatly asserted to me: "If a junkie tells you he got on to the stuff through his doctor, spit in his
eye." The addict of today does not ordinarily become initiated through medical treatment. However, most opium eaters
of the last century did, in fact, form the habit through medical treatment or by self-medication. One of the most
informative books (8) on drug addiction in the nineteenth century cites more than a hundred cases of addicts who
uniformly contracted the habit as a result of medical treatment. Terry and Pellens (9) quote numerous concurring
opinions on this point before 1900. Little emphasis was placed on the effects of evil association, and dope peddlers
were not mentioned because they were rare or nonexistent.
The public then bad an altogether different conception of drug addiction from that which prevails today. The habit was
not approved, but neither was it regarded as criminal or monstrous. It was usually looked upon as a vice or personal
misfortune, or much as alcoholism is viewed today. Narcotics users were pitied rather than loathed as criminals or
degenerates-an attitude which still prevails in Europe.
The sharp contrast between the former public attitude and the present one is well illustrated by the case of the
physician who contended in 1889 that it was obviously better to be a drug addict than a drunkard and therefore
advocated that chronic alcoholics be cured by transforming them into drug addicts. He published the following
statement on this question in a reputable medical journal:
The only grounds on which opium in lieu of alcohol can be claimed as reformatory are that it is less inimical to healthy
life than alcohol, that it calms in place of exciting the baser passions, and hence is less productive of acts of violence
and crime; in short, that as a whole the use of morphine in place of alcohol is but a choice of evils, and by far the
lesser. To be sure, the populace and even many physicians think very differently, but this is because they have not
thought as they should upon the matter.
On the score of economy the morphine habit is by far the better. The regular whiskey drinker can be made content in
his craving for stimulation, at least for quite a long time, on two or three grains of morphine a day, divided into
appropriate portions, and given at regular intervals. If purchased by the drachm at fifty cents this will last him twenty
days. Now it is safe to say that a like amount of spirits for the steady drinker cannot be purchased for two and one half
cents a day, and that the majority of them spend five and ten times that sum a day as a regular thing.
On the score, then, of a saving to the individual and his family in immediate outlay, and of incurred disability, of the
great diminution of peace disturbers and of crime, whereby an immense outlay will be saved the State; on the score of
decency of behavior instead of perverse deviltry, of bland courtesy instead of vicious combativeness; on the score of a
lessened liability to fearful diseases and the lessened propagation of pathologically inclined blood, I would urge the
substitution of morphine instead of alcohol for all to whom such a craving is an incurable propensity. In this way I
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