Reading - Working- class Opium Eating

 

Virginia Berridge, ‘Working-class Opium Eating in the Nineteenth Century: Establishing the Facts’, British Journal of Addiction, 73, (1978), pp.363 – 374.

‘to some contemporaries, opium was a ‘dram’ for the working class, a stimulant which threatened to replace drink, a denial of individual effort, or a means of racial degeneration.’

Increase in consumption of opium

17,000 lb in 1827 to 35,000 lb in 1833

55,000 – 67,000 lb 1828 – 1860

Death from opium in 1840 were as high as 5 deaths per million living, more than twice the death rate for arsenic. Compare to death rates of poverty?

Sales of opium pills to Manchester cotton workers. ‘Thorpe the Druggist informed me, that he commonly sold on market days two or three pound of opium, and a Gallon of Laudanum – all among the labouring classes.’

Detailed investigations found little evidence of opium used as a luxury, after questioning doctors from Manchester, Salford, Preston, and Derby. Mr. Robertson, Manchester ‘opium in any form is rarely used by the operatives as an article of luxury.’

 

Lancashire cotton famine – most of these people had begun by taking laudanum under medical advice, and had continued the practice until it became habitual. Morning chronicle 1849

Second half of 19^th century turned to investigate London but the Local Medical Officers of Health were more concerned with living conditions than of opium use.

The pauper inebriate – todays working class drug addict. Dr Normal Kerr noted in 1893 that there were as many ‘distressing cases among the poor as among the rich – ‘coachmens’ wives ruin their husbands.’ Problem of the poor drug taker was never solved in the various inebriate acts of 1879 and 1898.