ABSTRACT
There was no ‘drug problem’ in nineteenth-century Britain. The idea simply did not exist and would not have been understood by the Victorians. As I noted in Chapter 1, the term ‘drugs’ did not yet have its modern meaning as a grouping of psychoactive substances subject to criminal law controls. This is not to say that issues of consumption and intoxication were of no concern. On the contrary, in relation to alcohol, for example, habitual public drunkenness was a matter that aroused considerable anxiety in some quarters. But in terms of opium and opiates, it is certainly the case, as Virginia Berridge demonstrated in her groundbreaking book Opium and the People, that in the first half of the century there was little or no public or official concern (Berridge, 1999). Indeed, as she expertly charts, the use of opium-based ‘pick-me-ups’, tonics, medicines and elixirs was so widespread that it was largely viewed as a matter of everyday life (see also Berridge, 1977a, 1982). Often these were used therapeutically, for the easing of a wide range of common ailments and conditions, from toothache to diarrhoea. Sometimes they were used more for pleasure, what we would call today ‘recreational’ use. And at other times, the distinction between the ‘therapeutic’ and the ‘recreational’ was somewhat blurred, as the consumption of opium and opiates was
for many people simply a way of attempting to cope with the hardships of the daily grind of working-class life in Victorian Britain. The widespread use of opium-based soothing syrups for infants and babies – Godfrey’s Cordial and Mrs Winslow’s Soothing Syrup were amongst the most popular – is perhaps best understood from that perspective (Berridge, 1982: 2-3). It has been estimated that by the 1850s, there were as many as 25,000 separate outlets in England for the sale of opium (Harding, 1988: 8). This context is important – and those readers who want to know more are
directed to Virginia Berridge’s exemplary historical work (1977a, 1982, 1999) – as it raises even more sharply the ‘singularity’ that is the focus of this chapter. If opium was so pervasive and common in the first half of the century, why exactly were controls introduced in 1868 on opium and opiates? And why were these controls established in the form, structure and location that they were? And why were only certain psychoactive substances ‘captured’ by this regulatory development, whilst others were dealt with differently? As we will see in Chapter 4 in particular, this 1868 ‘event’ proved to be a significant turn in our genealogy of the contemporary imagination and regulation of the ‘drug problem’. The main body of this chapter thus considers the 1868 ‘event’ and seeks to identify some of the multiple lines of development from which this new regime of ‘pharmaceutical regulation’ (Berridge, 2005a) emerged. In conclusion, I attempt to pull together the implications of the analysis for my genealogical project and look forward to Chapter 4 which investigates another momentous ‘event’ some fifty years later in the early decades of the twentieth century.
