A century ago, narcotics were cheap and available without prescription, and granny ran the risk of being hooked by the family doctor.
Grandma was a Narcotics Junkie
I never knew Great-Great-Grandmother Mary MacGuillicuddy Morgan — she died in 1900 — but there are two stories my family tells about her. One is that in the middle of the nineteenth century young Mary and two brothers fled from starving Ireland in a small boat that they fearlessly sailed across the Atlantic to the United States, where they lived out their lives.
The other story, skipping to late in the last century, is that old Mary, by then the widow of a Harvard-educated physician, spent her final years as a narcotics addict in Chicago. She was hooked on laudanum — opium doused in alcohol — and she visited druggists in the neighborhood to buy it by the pint. Her children and grandchildren, disgusted by her “evil habit,” called on the druggists to beg them not to sell any more narcotics to the old lady. But driven by her terrible compulsion, old Mary trudged about town and rode the horse trolley to other neighborhoods where druggists and grocers who didn’t know her would provide the irresistible deadly drug.
Occasionally, she might order the laudanum from her Sears Roebuck catalogue, which at the turn of the century offered a two-ounce bottle for eighteen cents, or two dollars for one and a half pints. (The catalogue also sold turpentine “for internal or external use,” opium, and paregoric, another dangerous opiate. They were described as “Special Family Remedies, a necessary article in every house ….. They often relieve severe pain and sometimes save life.”
On the other side of the family was Grandfather Johnny Griffin. I never knew him, either. He died in 1931, a year before I was born. Half a century earlier, about 1880, Johnny also endured a nightmare of narcotics when he discovered to his horror that his young bride, Amelia, was a “dope fiend,” as addicts were called in those days even in the scientific literature. An 1881 Chicago newspaper put it this way “She was an habitual morphine eater, taking as high as three bottles a week. She started using opium and morphine powders to allay pain from some head trouble.”
Trying to help free Amelia from her private hell. Johnny arranged to have her hospitalized for three and a half months in order to cure her.
There were three primary “cures” in those days. The first, which probably was worse than the addiction, was called the “perturbative” method. Today we’d call it “cold turkey,” meaning the victim was cut off instantly from drugs. This was a violent procedure that drove some sufferers to suicide and visited upon all the psychic horrors and unspeakable pain that comes with sudden withdrawal.
The second was the “reductionary” method, in which the daily dosage of narcotics was gradually reduced.
The popular third method was substitution, in which an addict was “cured” of one addiction by substituting another Doctors cured opium addicts by hooking them on morphine and morphine addicts on codeine or cocaine.
Whatever it was that the hospital tried on poor Amelia, however terrifying the eternal nights that chilled her frightened bones, regardless of the mad carnival of grotesque visitors from hell that danced before her eyes — all was in vain. Within weeks after her release she was fully addicted again, and Johnny was at his wits’ end trying to scratch out a living by renovating used feathers and living in a smelly room over a public stable with a wife who seemed to be growing insane from drugs. Finally, he tried to take them away from her and Amelia, remembering the horror of withdrawal in the hospital, seized a hatchet and swung it violently at Johnny’s head. He dodged the blow from the blade and knocked her down, pinning her to the floor until her rage subsided.
“She is insane,” he was certain now, and decided she must be committed to the county asylum, not realizing how the system worked even then in Chicago. The assistant county medical officer examined her, demanded two dollars from Johnny for the efforts that were supposed to be administered free of charge, and only then agreed to sign the court petition for Amelia’s insanity hearing.
Then he told Johnny “For another ten dollars, I’ll testify she’s insane.” Johnny, to whom money did not come easily then or ever. protested. The doctor responded that if Johnny didn’t pay it, he’d testify Amelia was sane. And that’s exactly what the county’s doctor did. The judge freed poor Amelia and seven days later she swallowed thirty grains of morphine powder, slipped into a coma, and died.
A family’s horrors. A coincidence, was it, that nearly a century ago two of our women, from separate branches of the family, were narcotics addicts? A family’s disgrace, to be whispered behind closed doors, an “unutterably disgusting habit” (in the words of one nineteenth-century doctor) confined to “degenerates and moral imbeciles with weak willpower” (in the words of another)?
On the contrary, poor old Mary MacGuillicuddy Morgan and young Amelia Armstrong Griffin were typical victims of their times. The United States had more drug addicts in the second half of the nineteenth century than it does today, some historians say, even though the population then was much smaller. Early in the twentieth century, according to a U.S. Treasury study, the United States was consuming ten times as much opium per capita as the largest opium-using country in Europe. Americans were seized by addiction — not hooked on drugs by vile criminals slinking in the shadows, but by their family doctors. They were lured into lifetime bondage by advertisements for drug-soaked patent medicines in the nation’s most respected newspapers and magazines. Novelists and essayists sang the siren song of opium, morphine, and laudanum. Narcotics were all but forced upon Americans in the last third of the nineteenth century in drugstores, grocery stores, and other outlets, cheap in price and as freely available without prescription as aspirin and cold tablets are today.
Many soft drinks were loaded with cocaine, and thousands of Americans were addicted to such drinks as Koca Nola, Celery Cola, Cafe Cola, Koke, and other popular beverages of the day.
Physicians, in keeping with the best medical opinions of the time, prescribed opium and other narcotics for almost every ailment. Many doctors then acted as their own druggists by filling prescriptions from their own supplies.
“Much as we may loathe the drug,” one physician said, echoing the attitude of most, “it is undeniable that it destroys the germs of seven-tenths of the diseases of mankind. If I were limited by law to the use of a single drug in my practice … I should not hesitate to name that toxic remedy. There are special diseases that can be reached by no other known agencies.”
Special diseases? In fact, opium and its deadly offspring were prescribed in virtually every situation known to medicine. They were used (and still are, with devastating effectiveness) as painkillers and as agents for contrailing the diarrhea that was chronic in post-Civil War urban America. But encouraged by medical textbooks, doctors also used opiates for everything from asthma to tuberculosis, including diabetes, cancer, insanity, “excessive brain work,” itching, and “nerve pain.”
There even was some hope for narcotics as sexual stimulants. One respected medical writer in 1871 called hashish “a powerful aphrodisiac. ranking second after [get this!] arsenic.” A physician announced to the American Philosophical Society that a young man of his acquaintance had swallowed a dose of hashish and alcohol, resulting in a sexual erection “which did not relax short of three days.” An important medical journal reported on the case of a thirty-year-old man “of prodigious development of the sexual organs and a proportionate exaltation of function amounting to an impetuous and uncontrollable salacity.” It attributed his extraordinary size and appetite to his habitual use of opiates from the age of four. A medical writer, commenting on the case, said similar cases of uncontrollable appetite for sexual adventure could be “neutralized by the free use of lemon juice.” He didn’t say whether one should drink it or soak in it.
Many responsible authorities were convinced that narcotics were no more dangerous or habit-forming than any of the other “vices” of the day, and far less vile than drunkenness. They ranked the use of narcotics with drinking tea (a mild aphrodisiac, they said) and coffee (a drink that “increases intellectual powers”) and smoking tobacco (which they thought caused blindness, gray hair, memory loss, and an unstable mind).
In 1860 an indignant physician named Oliver Wendell Holmes had this to say about the state of medicine: “If the whole materia medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind — and all the worse for the fishes.”
But the famed poet and dean of the Harvard Medical School made an exception for opium, “which the Creator himself seems to prescribe, for we often see the scarlet poppy growing in cornfields, as if it were foreseen that wherever there is hunger to be fed there must also be pain to be soothed.”
As late as 1894 a London physician, Patrick Hehir, wrote a massive book defending the use of opium. Dr. Hehir said it’s untrue that opium smokers and opium eaters require larger and larger doses and it’s also untrue that they can’t quit at the snap of their fingers if they decide to.
Warming up to his extraordinary theme, Dr. Hehir told the world that coffee, tea, tobacco, and alcohol are “far more harmful” than opium when used in moderation.
“Excessive use of opium … is not worse than excess of alcohol, beef, etc.,” he insisted, advising that the drug also prevents cholera and helps keep you warm in cold weather. Besides, he added in what might have been the central point, the opium trade was worth ten million pounds a year to the Indian exchequer.
Dr. Hehir’s wishful thinking was typical of the medical profession’s attitude towards narcotics in the nineteenth century. Physicians sought to cure puzzling diseases even though little more knowledge was at their disposal in those years than was possessed by medical men in the dark days of the Middle Ages.
Doctors treated symptoms, such as pain, diarrhea, and coughing, instead of the ailments themselves because they didn’t know the causes of most illnesses. There was a hopelessness about disease, and when cholera epidemics and other diseases swept the nation’s filthy cities, doctors and druggists were among those who fled to the countryside for safety, leaving the poor citizenry alone to face the vicious killers that couldn’t be seen or heard
One treatment for cholera required the patient to put his feet in hot ashes and water, swallow a dose of opium and calomel, and then cover up in a bed filled with heated bricks and boiled ears of corn.
Each time a new discovery was made in the drug field in the nineteenth century, it was heralded as mankind’s savior. About 1805, a young, self-taught German chemist named Frederick Serturner discovered a new substance in opium. He called it morphium, for the god of sleep; but after several experiments that nearly put some of his neighbors to sleep for good he warned: “I consider it my duty to attract attention to the terrible effect of this new substance in order that calamity may be averted.”
Nobody listened to young Serturner, and physicians and scientists throughout Europe and the United States acclaimed morphine a marvelous drug with the curative powers of opium but without its terrible habit-forming attribute. Decades passed before they discovered they had never been more wrong.
In 1844 cocaine was isolated from coca leaves and it was seized upon by the medical profession. Years later a young Viennese doctor named Sigmund Freud discovered it for himself. Calling it “a magical drug,” he said cocaine was superb for depression and indigestion and enduring hunger, pain, and fatigue. He swore it was nonaddictive “even after repeated taking,” used the narcotic himself, and pushed it on patients, friends, colleagues, and even his sisters.
In 1854 a Scottish physician perfected the first practical syringe and the technique to use it; his wife became the world’s first known morphine addict hooked by syringe and also the first person to die from an overdose administered by syringe.
But the medical profession was ecstatic about the development of the syringe, which offered a faster and more direct way to administer medicine than orally or through an incision made in the skin. According to one important source: “It is very doubtful if any painful condition to which the human race is heir escaped the list of those for which [the hypodermic use of morphine] was recommended.”
More wishful thinking: the best authorities were convinced for many years that narcotics could be injected without leading to addiction, and as late as 1900 medical texts carried no word of warning about the terrible dangers of hypodermic application of morphine.
In 1899 Heinrich Dreser, of Germany’s famed Bayer Works, gave the world what became its most widely used painkiller, aspirin. But a year earlier Dreser had made a different sort of discovery. He produced a chemical, diacetylmorphine hydrochloride, which he proudly described to a meeting of the Congress of German Naturalists and Physicians as a wonderdrug ten times as effective as codeine in slowing respiration but only one-tenth as toxic. It would find widespread use, Dreser predicted. He was right. He had discovered heroin.
Wishful thinking at its worst: medical men on both sides of the Atlantic supported Dreser’s claims and added new ones, telling the world that the first non-habit-forming narcotic finally was available to mankind. They said they found heroin useful in treating tuberculosis, bronchitis, asthma, insomnia, coughs, chest pains, peritonitis, heart disease, and pelvic problems. One physician in 1902 even advised his peers to use heroin to cure morphine and codeine addiction, and the medical profession continued to debate how heroin might be used as a medicine as late as the 1920’s.
As one might guess, there were many bronchitis sufferers, insomniacs, and others in the early 1900’s who suddenly discovered that they had a new and far worse problem — heroin addiction. In fact, a leading medical historian believes that the epidemic of drug addiction in the United States would have been ended or at least sharply diminished early in the twentieth century but for Heinrich Dreser’s unfortunate discovery.
But an epidemic it was, and it has never quite ended. However, the nineteenth century’s addicts were far different persons from today’s. Women outnumbered men by nearly three to one, many of these women were middle-aged, and most were white. The addicts were “the noblest and the best” among womanhood, mourned one observer.
An Iowa health official wrote in 1885 that narcotics’ “helpless victims … have not come from the ranks of reckless men and fallen women, but the majority of them are to be found among the educated and most honored and useful members of society … The habit in a vast majority of cases is first formed by the unpardonable carelessness of physicians, who are often too fond of using a little syringe, or relieving every ache and pain by the administration of an opiate.”
Another authority described the type of person that he thought was most prone to addiction: “A delicate female, having light blue eyes and flaxen hair, possesses, according to my observations, the maximum susceptibility.”
Women of that time used opium and morphine on the advice of their doctors for “female complaints,” both real and imaginary; they also dosed themselves with a variety of patent medicines widely advertised as cure-alls, women’s friends, consumption cures, and painkillers — many of which were loaded with narcotics.
Young mothers gave their fretful and restless infants such universally used patent medicines as Mistress Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, Mother Bailey’s Quieting Syrup, and Kopp’s Baby’s Friend — all of them loaded with opium and virtually certain to addict their tiny users.
Wives secretly dumped opium and morphine powders into their husbands’ coffee or tea, following the directions on the label that said taking doses of these narcotics would cure alcoholism.
Doctors consumed it — and probably constituted the greatest group of narcotics addicts in the nation after women: they used it to calm themselves and increase their stamina. At least one country doctor kept his faithful horse as doped as himself to endure the endless hard days and nights of work.
One Missouri doctor so overworked himself during a malaria epidemic that he suffered terribly from insomnia. Finally, he gave himself an injection of one-fifth of a grain of morphine, and twenty minutes later — feeling no reaction — took another shot of one-third of a grain Almost instantly after the second dose of the Judas drug (“it kisses, then it betrays,” wrote one frightened addict), the doctor passed into what he described as “a rested and delightful frame of mind.” He said he soon saw ecstatic visions of “marble palaces, stately dames dancing minuets, lovely girls flitting about hilariously to sensuous music, the cathedrals of Milan and Cologne, whirling along in cabs across the continent of Europe and sailed over oceans, at all times accompanied by agreeable companions who talked delightfully on the most entertaining subjects.”
But when the delirium ended, he said, “the awakening was terrible. My mouth was parched, my lips dry, my head ached violently, and I cursed morphine as the very devil among drugs. Yet, think of the folly and the weakness of man! Within two months I was bound hand and foot by the demon and he held me fast for fourteen years.”
Whole families were hooked by the deadly drugs. For many years after the hypodermic syringe came into widespread use during the Civil War, many doctors taught patients or members of the family to use it so they wouldn’t have to make a personal appearance each time a patient was scheduled for an injection. Artistically decorated syringe kits were available for home use.
One family of four — mother, father, son, and daughter — was addicted by a physician who left a syringe with them. The same doctor is said to have led at least two hundred of his patients into the hell of narcotics addiction.
Wives of a few addicts voluntarily addicted themselves so they could share their husbands’ agonies and try to make the horror easier to endure. But cases of addicts luring others into the habit were virtually unknown in the nineteenth century, when drugs were cheap and legal and addicts didn’t have to raise huge sums of money to support the habit, as they must today.
One Ohio doctor, however, himself an addict and weary of the incessant reproaches of his wife, laced her tea with morphine three times a day until she was hooked. It still didn’t shut her up.
Merchants took narcotics to steel their nerves against the pressures of business; many preferred it to liquor because there was no telltale odor on their breath and because addiction under normal circumstances is difficult to detect, even for a spouse.
Students used narcotics because they were overworked, and soldiers because they were underworked. Preachers, temperance lecturers, writers, and lawyers depended on drugs to quicken their minds and waiters to quicken their memories. Clerks, vendors, and teamsters used them, as did overworked and underpaid factory workers.
In high society drugs were used for two reasons, a writer of the day said: For the men, “society’s whirl demands late hours — a little punch, perhaps salad; sleep must be immediate or the man of business will not get any.” He got his sleep, thanks to an injection or a powder. And then there was “the lady of haut ton, idly lolling upon her velvet fauteuil and vainly trying to cheat the lagging hours that intervene ere the clockwork tintinnabulum shall sound the hour for opera or whist.”
Workers in the fisheries of Alaska were given morphine to make them work faster; at the end of each season many were confirmed addicts. In the South, overseers put cocaine in the rations of black field hands to get more work out of them. Construction, mill, and mining workers were offered or fed narcotics with their rations.
Every pioneer family going West carried a medicine chest with their favorite patent medicines and bottles of opium and morphine. Frontier doctors, what few there were, depended on opiates as the only sure painkiller in a place where pain was an everyday occurrence.
Disease, accidents, and gunshot wounds were so common that frontier men and women surely were the unhealthiest Americans in history, and among the most doped up.
One mountaineer with a tooth ache, which drove him almost out of his mind with pain, traded all his furs for one bottle of laudanum at a frontier town. A Texas doctor gave every patient a dose of opium, regardless of complaint. He might have been the reincarnation of a celebrated European physician of two centuries earlier, who used opium so promiscuously that he was called Or. Opiatus.
The epidemic embraced the nation. A physician-historian wrote in 1871: “Corroborative accounts come in from New Jersey and Indiana, from Boston at one extreme and from St. Louis at another, and from the impoverished South as well. In the Mississippi Valley particularly the use of stimuli of every name is fearfully on the increase.”
It was to get far worse, until the greatest mass of opiate addicts in history were walking the earth, horrified by their plight but too terrified to end it.
Opium has been used medicinally for thousands of years. The Egyptian, Persian, and Greek civilizations were familiar with it. Homer mentions it in the Iliad and Hippocrates recommended it. Virgil remarked on it in the Aeneid. It became so popular in the Roman Empire that shopkeepers and wandering quacks were hawking it to the plebeians. The drug continued in widespread use through the Middle Ages and when Cardinal Richelieu was ill in 1642, his French doctors gave him horse dung in white wine. Next they gave him a dose of laudanum. Next he died. In 1700 a London textbook on opium called it “a safe and noble Panacea.”
Opium was popular in colonial America and was commonly used by military surgeons in the Revolution.
In 1822 Thomas De Quincey, one of several English writers addicted to opium, published his dismaying masterpiece, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. It made addiction fashionable and continued to lure many new victims to the treacherous drug for a century or more after it was published.
Patent medicines, many heavily laced with opiates were imported from England in the 1700’s until our own charlatans began pushing homemade nostrums after the Revolution. But it wasn’t until the middle of the nineteenth century that patent medicines came into their own. There were several reasons for this: doctors were distrusted, often for good cause, and the people tended to try to cure themselves; giveaway postal rates were authorized by Congress; it became economical to publish cheap newspapers, thanks to free delivery by the Post Office in the county of publication: and, because rising numbers of people learned to read, the American masses could now be scared out of their skins by quack medical advertisements in newspapers, magazines, almanacs, farm journals, and on roadside signs, sidewalk sandwich boards, and even handbills delivered door to door — in short, virtually everywhere a person turned.
The nostrum makers terrified millions into using their usually worthless and often dangerous products by describing horrible diseases — many of them invented by advertising agents — waiting to destroy mankind. Revolting intestinal worms, growing as long as sixty feet, were described so often in advertisements that they must have been especially effective salesmen for the quacks. After terrifying the reader, they reassured him or her by guaranteeing — absolutely guaranteeing! — that there was a single miraculous product that would cure this malady and many others as well. Many of the nostrums were described as cures for a wide range of problems. One claimed to cure twenty-five ailments, from headaches to sore feet. Another laid claim to fifty-five disorders, and said it also was good for what ails horses, cows, and sheep. There was no law against lying in ads, outrageous claims were considered to be just good salesmanship.
When the guns at Fort Sumter called Americans from North and South to war, the young soldiers from city and farm brought with them bottles and tins of their favorite patent remedies. Their military surgeons treated them with the same nostrums and made liberal use of opium, which the Union army’s surgeon-general later called “an invaluable remedy.” The wounded were usually given an opium pill or a shot of morphine automatically “because they expected it.” the surgeon-general said. For each of the North’s four hundred thousand wounded, fifteen more were felled by sickness. The average soldier was sick enough to need medical help more than twice a year during the war. Most often he suffered cruelly from diarrhea, dysentery. and malaria. Opiates were used against these and other illnesses, plus as a painkiller and sleeping powder, and so many soldiers marched home after the war with a monkey on their backs that addiction came to be known as the “army disease …” Soldiers shared with their families their terrors from the war and the pain from their injuries and ailments that sometimes lasted a lifetime. Quite often their wives and their child ren became addicts, too.
The “Westerling” movement added illnesses and hardship to the American fabric, and patent-medicine makers, unshackled by laws, lured increasing numbers to their dangerous wares after the war ended. Doctors, ignorant of the causes of many diseases, treated the ailing with their favorite narcotics.
Opium morphine, laudanum, paregoric, and patent medicines containing these drugs were available throughout the country, without a doctor’s prescription. An 1878 Michigan state health department report said “it would not be difficult for a lunatic or a child” to get all the opium he wanted, “provided he told a plausible story and had the money to pay for it.” Every drugstore carried it, and some doctors, frightened by the spreading addiction, took to carrying a notice on their prescription blanks “respectfully requesting” druggists not to refill an opiate prescription without first obtaining the doctor’s permission.
Many pharmacists insisted that misuse of narcotics was the customer’s problem, not the pharmacists. Also, they said, poor people couldn’t afford to pay for both the writing of a prescription and the medicine itself, and they clearly needed the medicine more than the prescription.
Drugstores weren’t the only place narcotics and hypodermics were sold. Grocers carried them. So did bookstores, tobacco shops, and department stores. Country stores kept farm families supplied with opiates.
And, of course, the mail-order houses offered wide selections of opium products, syringe kits with instructions on how to use them, and all the important patent medicines. (Experts estimate that there were between 50,000 and 65,000 different nostrums readily available around the turn of the century.)
The public didn’t approve of narcotics addiction, but neither did it consider the habit monstrous. Addicts were viewed more with pity than loathing, although many persons considered addiction as immoral as dancing and theatergoing. Unlike today, addicts didn’t expect to be fired if their bosses discovered their habit, and husbands and wives didn’t divorce their hooked spouses.
The addicts lived normal lives in their communities — addicted men worked regularly, addicted women managed their households, and addicted children attended school without interruption.
Many authorities believed drug addiction was far better than being a drunkard (“opium soothes, alcohol maddens,” it was said), and there was a movement to convert alcoholics to the syringe.
One Cincinnati physician bragged about converting a number of his hard-drinking patients and said if all drunks in America were switched to narcotics, “the mayors and police courts would almost languish for lack of business; the criminal dockets, with their attendant legal functionaries, would have much less to do than they now have.” He insisted that he could prove “the law-abiding quality of opium-eating peoples” and said it’s obvious to anyone who “carefully watches and reflects on the quiet, introspective gaze of the morphine habitué and compares it with the riotous, devil-may-care leer of the drunkard.”
Nor would drug addiction send the addict’s family to the poorhouse. Narcotics were far cheaper than liquor in those days. A doctor estimated in 1889 that an addict could stay doped up for about two and a half cents a day, but that it could cost as much as twenty-five cents a day to stay boozed up.
Poor blacks in the South favored cocaine because it was the cheapest high they could find. Furthermore, many persons, both black and white, believed that cocaine imparted protection against bullets, and this led police in several Southern towns to raise the caliber of their pistols from .32 to .38.
If most people pitied “opium-eaters,” there was one class that despised them: opium smokers.
Chinese immigrants brought the smoking habit to this country, and after the Civil War it spread eastward from San Francisco. By 1880, opium-smoking dens were reported to be operating in almost every town and city in the United States. (A den in downtown Chicago was charging “pipe hitters” twenty-five cents a pipeful in 1877.) Rich actresses, businessmen, and doctors in New York City were reported in 1914 to have elaborate rooms set as ide in their homes for smoking opium with jeweled pipes.
Cowboys said that as late as 1910 they could ride anywhere in the West and find a smoking den wherever they stopped, without having to carry along a supply of opium and a pipe.
Smokers despised addicts who swallowed or injected the drug because they correctly considered those habits more difficult to break. When a smoker in a New York opium den discovered a man giving himself a hypodermic injection in the bathroom, the smoker stormed angrily into the manager’s office and complained to him loudly: “There’s a goddamn dope fiend in the can!” The troublemaker was immediately thrown out.
This feeling of contempt was returned tenfold by opium-eaters and the general public. A reformed opium-eater, who felt compassion and pity for most users, had this to say in 1895 about smokers: “Let there be full understanding. The opium-smoking habit comes of association with unholy persons …. The surroundings are always repulsive and the inmates of these resorts are criminals or petty offenders against police regulations. They are ignorant, illiterate, vulgar, brutal, and wicked. An insistence that a virtuous and good person could be led thither by any sort of influence is a suggestion of absurdity … The more depraved wretches of the sinful-female class resort to the pipe and their exit from this world is along a fast road that has no way stations.”
Many Americans, once hooked on narcotics, were horrified at their plight and spent the rest of their lives trying to warn others away.
“Better death or invalidism than the contraction of a habit that degrades, demoralizes, and finally kills,” warned one despairing addict.
Nevertheless, frustrated medical men and addicts themselves tried everything to cure the habit that enslaved so many. Sober medical journals recommended cold baths, hot baths, and steambaths; frequent, vigorous shampoos of the addict’s hair; administering electric shocks; drinking jugs of coffee and beef broth; giving addicts hypodermic injections of coffee, caffeine, cocaine, and codeine; and substituting claret for laudanum and brandy for morphine.
It was concern for the plight of the Chinese, who were imprisoned by an addiction foisted on them by India and England, that brought the first great international pressure for controls on narcotics in the early years of this century. American missionaries in China, appalled at what they saw, bombarded the American public and politicians with letters, articles, and speeches describing the condition of the people of China and demanding action. President Theodore Roosevelt swung his weight behind the movement and many in Congress followed him. As the international campaign developed, America slowly discovered that it had an enormous narcotics problem of its own, probably the worst in the Western world.
The first important step was passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906, which required labeling of patent medicines for the first time. No longer could a nostrum contain opiates, alcohol, or other dangerous ingredients without saying so on the label. The act stunned the charlatans.
A 1909 federal act prohibited importation of smoking-type opium.
In 1914, the Harrison Narcotics Act, the nation’s basic narcotics law, was signed by Woodrow Wilson. It brought all opiates under strict federal control.
The New York Times reported in April 1915 that the police department’s seventeen-man “dope squad” had dried up street sales of heroin and cocaine and that many addicts were appearing at police stations across the country begging to be supplied with narcotics or cured. Many despondent addicts had committed suicide, the Times said, and several others died after consuming other dangerous drugs and chemicals in a vain effort to head off the dreaded symptoms of withdrawal from narcotics.
Meanwhile, diplomats from the United States and other powers throughout the world were weaving a tapestry of agreements between 1909 and 1914 that they believed would lead to international control on the movement of opiates. “The great purpose” had been accomplished, announced a happy Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan.
Every generation can tell stories to younger ones about “how things used to be” of course, and most elders relish those moments. Some of us in that elders category, though, find ourselves thinking, “Golly. And here I thought the 1960s were wild.” … Even we have to admit that braless women marching in the streets hardly compares to ordering opium nartcotics from the Sears catalogue. Sadly, Sears has all but disappeared, taking its catalogue with it, but we cannot help but wonder if it might have held on longer had they been able to keep on selling opium.
