Opium Addiction

In the United States the character of addiction to the opium poppy and its derivatives was entirely different from the character of the Chinese experience.

A decade before the Civil War the opium-addicted population in the United States consisted mainly of Caucasian women who legally purchased opium-laced cough syrups and elixirs. Many took laudanum (the opium poppy in its liquid form) to alleviate pain or settle coughs and became dependent on the opium-based mixtures.

Surveys between 1878 and 1885 indicated that 56 percent to 71 percent of opiate addicts in the United States were middle-to upper-class white women who purchased the drug legally.

Opium smoking occurred primarily on the West Coast, because it was the closest port of entry for opium from the Far East.

Americans were known to frequent traditional opium smoking dens. IN the movie like Wild Bill the character Bill Hickok struggles with his failing eyesight and turn to the comfort of the opium pipe. The opium den is depicted as an exotic, mysterious place, with subdued colors, where one can retreat to the privacy of ones own dreams. In the den, an attentive Chinese woman who fills his pipe every so often cares for Hickok; he smokes and drifts off to a dream world where he can escape his fears.

Opium dens, however, were described by newspaper stories in real life as “horrifying opium dens where yellow fiends forced unsuspecting white women to become enslaved to the mischievous drug.”

This powerful racist propaganda was fueled, in part, by feelings that the depression was caused by the country’s surplus of Chinese workers. The opium dens of San Francisco were publicly condemned for stealing the mythic virtue of white women.

Heroin powder proved to be more potent and addictive than the opium-based laudanum (liquid form of opium) most women drank. The practice of selling patent medicines containing morphine, opium, and heroin had no legal regulation in this country until 1906 when the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed.

Between 1875 and 1877 the country’s first opium laws were passed in San Francisco, California; Virginia City, Nevada; and Portland, Oregon. The laws were primarily aimed at outlawing the opium dens that had proliferated with Chinese immigration. It was not until 1887 that Congress passed a bill prohibiting the importation of opium by both U.S. and Chinese citizens. The law created a black market for opium in its crude, smokeable form and ignored the opium derivatives morphine and later heroin, which were claiming the souls of thousands of men and women. A serious problem faced by reformers and prohibitionists was the economic power that the chemical companies had achieved. Thus, consumers continued to drink patent medicine remedies with innocent sounding names, unaware of the addictive contents until the Pure Food and Drug Act required labeling and disclosure of all ingredients.

A reform and prohibitionist movement, determined to eliminate the use of opium and its derivatives in patent medicines, sprang up in the last quarter nineteenth century.

In 1900 Dr. John Witherspoon delivered a speech to the American Medical Association, which had been founded in 1847, warning his colleagues of perils of opiate addiction. In 1903 the federal government established the U.S. Opium Commission for the purpose of studying ways to regulate opium, and its derivatives. The alarming amount of opium being imported led to a congressional act in 1909 prohibiting the importation of opium for all but medicinal purposes.

What would sound the death knell for the legal opium business, the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914 was initially debated and killed in Congress in the 1910-11 session. Dr. Hamilton Wright was the driving force behind the legislation and was the one who drafted it. Wright had become a visible force in the anti-opium debate, again appealing to the racist fears of the dominant white culture.

This did not, of course, end heroin or opium addiction. It did, however, change the social makeup of the typical addict from that of the middle-class white woman to the lower-class white man, along with proportionate numbers of minority men.