The Moralization of Opioids
These 19th-century documents show how opioids became equated with moral failure
In this post we’ll take a look at 3 texts from the late 19th century that show the development of the disease model of drug use. In an upcoming post, we’ll see how these ideas were pushed by elite institutions and eventually reified into the modern “addiction”/“substance use disorder” paradigm. The texts I’ll focus on here are:
• Opiophagism or Psychology of Opium Eating (1875) by W. A. F. Browne
• Drugs That Enslave: The Opium, Morphine, Chloral and Hashisch Habits (1881) by H. H. Kane
• Opium Smoking and Opium Eating, Their Treatment and Cure (1881) by George Shearer
One major storyline within High and Mighty is the historical construction of the concept of drug addiction, a phenomenon whose very existence owes to the moral values and economic interests of the fin-de-siècle ruling classes within the US, Europe, and China. We’ll look at this more closely in future posts. Before we dive in too deep, however, I figured it might be appropriate to dip our toes in, so to speak.
I have gathered below 3 documents from the late 19th century which exemplify the evolving (or, more accurately, devolving) attitude(s) toward drug use—particularly the use of opium and its derivatives—in that period. In them, we see the roots of an ideology which is still around to this day, although its attendant vocabulary has morphed a bit over the years.
Let’s take a look.
1. Opiophagism or Psychology of Opium Eating (1875) by W. A. F. Browne
While the moralistic qualities ascribed to opium trace largely to the geopolitical events of the mid-19th century, the imagery associated with it drew from other areas, such as the body of drug literature which was by then already quite rich. For example, Opiophagism draws on specific references to Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) to mold a rather selective image of opium use and its consequences.
The romantic literature of De Quincey and others provided fodder for the conceptualization of drug use as escapist fantasy. The author of Opiophagism, W. A. F. Browne, combines references from such literature with the then-emerging taboo around opium—which was itself due to the politicization of the trade resulting from two consecutive wars, etc.—to construct an image of opium use as simultaneously useless and harmful.
These qualities are strikingly different from those given to opium in much of the era’s medical literature, in which opium was often considered both indispensable and benign. Opium was then, and would remain for years, an essential medicine for numerous conditions. But after the politicization of the opium trade, the drug was given a dual identity which it managed for decades: an essential medicine on the one hand; a morally harmful vice on the other.
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