ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the conditions which have initially contributed to the regulation of opium and opiate preparations. It takes nineteenth century Britain as a case study. The chapter focuses on the British history provides insight to processes that were going in other industrialising states. In the eighteenth century the good order, enrichment and health of the population in general emerged as one of the essential objectives of political power. The public hygiene movement was a further nineteenth century expression of the concern for the health and physical wellbeing of the population which emerged as part of the governmental domain during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In relation to health, Foucault suggests that the objectives of power included the cultivation of physical wellbeing and longevity. These concerns were clearly expressed in the longevity debates initiated by the life insurance claim of the Earl of Mar. The experience of nineteenth century Britons and Americans with the medical use of narcotic drugs was remarkably similar.
