Opium Use in the USA in 19th Century

It is hard to imagine that opium use in the USA was once widespread and legal. It is even harder to imagine that opium was freely available and could be bought in drug stores, grocers shops and was freely dispensed by doctors. Many proprietary medicines (around 600) containing opium were sold, claiming cures for pain, sleeplessness, consumption and for women help for painful periods and the menopause. One of the most commonly used opiate substances was Laudanum, a mixture of opium and alcohol. There were also opiate medications for children to help with teething and other children’s complaints. So opium use, either in a medication or as raw opium for smoking or eating, was widely used.

Most of the UK opium came from either India or Turkey but there were attempts at home producing. The Royal Horticultural Society offered an annual prize for the best opium crop by a gardener, a prize that was won by an Edinburgh minister. However the climate in the UK was not conducive to growing opium in either high quantities or of high quality.

In the USA, they also imported opium but large quantities of high grade opium were produced on farms in California, Arizona, Virginia, Tennessee and many other states. Congress did not actually legislate against growing opium until as recently as 1942, although most states had made it illegal prior to this.

The concept of addiction was neither known nor of great concern till late in the 19th century, coming into vogue in the 20th century. In fact there was no real distinction between opium use as medication and opium use for recreation. It was used freely and with no social stigma. Surveys carried out in the late 19th century in the USA show that opium use was far more prevalent in women than men. It also tended to be the older or middle aged women rather than the younger women. Further it tended to be the upper classes rather than the lower or working classes that indulged. Partly this situation may have been due to the sanctions against women consuming alcohol, so it was less stigmatising for women to use opium than to drink.

In the late 19th century we also see the rise of the Temperance Movement, a group who campaigned vigorously to control and eventually ban alcohol. For not only was opium being widely and liberally used, so too was alcohol. This movement gained in popularity through holding mass meetings where alcohol was vilified and calls were made for people to ‘sign the pledge’, that is sign a paper swearing never to drink again. It was the influence of this movement that led to the 18th Amendment, or the prohibition years between 1920 and 1933.

The anti-opiate body also existed in the USA but was never as active or as popular. So it is actually quite vague how opium came to be banned and indeed banned before alcohol was.

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