The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [54]
Who was the man who invented laudanum? I thank him from the bottom of my heart whoever he was. If all the miserable wretches in pain of body and mind, whose comforter he has been, could meet together to sing his praises, what a chorus it would be! I have had six delicious hours of oblivion; I have woke up with my mind composed; I have written a perfect little letter…; I have drunk my nice cup of tea, with a real relish of it; I have dawdled over my morning toilet with an exquisite sense of relief—and all through the modest little bottle of Drops, which I see on my bedroom chimney-piece at this moment. “Drops,” you are a darling! If I love nothing else, I love you.18
Increasingly, from 1850 to 1915, middle-and upper-class women got so comfortable with their habit that at the opera they took syringes out of little beaded opium purses and shot up in front of everyone, the way you might take a mint. Blouse fashions changed to hide the track marks. As drug historian Barbara Hodgson put it, “[Their] habit was no longer confined to stuffy sickrooms; it was out in the open, even flaunted. Reliable statistics are difficult to come by, but numerous references imply that morphine syringes among the theatre crowd were as common as cigarettes.”19 That’s a lot of morphine. In 1908 the San Francisco Examiner featured a large article on jeweled morphine paraphernalia: syringes and vials. In a similar magazine one could find ads for “Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup” (opium and 90 proof alcohol), with text that advised mothers that the medicine “should always be used” for teething and colic. The writer Alphonse Daudet described a socialite addicted to morphine in one of his novels: “There’s a whole society like that…. When they get together, each of these women, carrying their little silver cases with the needle, the poison…and wham! In the arm, in the leg…. It doesn’t make you sleep…but one feels good.”20 Imports of opium to Britain in 1839 totaled 41,000 pounds, and by 1852 they reached 114,000 pounds a year. In 1840 the United States imported about 24,000 pounds of opium a year; by 1867 the number hit 135,000 pounds, and by the 1890s, over 500,000 pounds came in annually.
In William James’s classic The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), he tells us about the “New Thought” cure (more on that in the next chapter), and cites a woman’s letter to him. I like how casually her letter mentions drug use, and how clearly such a thing represented cure rather than recreation or self-indulgence.
Life seemed difficult to me at one time. I was always breaking down, and had several attacks of what is called nervous prostration, with terrible insomnia, being on the verge of insanity; besides having many other troubles, especially of the digestive organs. I had been sent away from home in charge of doctors, had taken all the narcotics, stopped all work, been fed up, and in fact knew all the doctors within reach. But I never recovered permanently till this New Thought took possession of me.
Hear that? The way she mentions narcotics? It is the sound of historical difference: a great age of medical confidence in narcotics was over, but our period of narcotic criminality was still a long way away. Across all these periods, some people took drugs for happiness.
Where did all the legal opium go? I think one important answer is that when TB was tamed, the need for a cough suppressant and painkiller diminished. The bacteriological revolution’s triumph over so many fatal childhood illnesses removed some of the strongest reasons for dosing oneself or one’s family. Also, some addictions used to be indistinguishable from common wasting illnesses, and once these latter were eradicated, the junkies really stood out: there was no crowd of blameless ghouls among whom an addict could blend. Another big answer is that legal opium or close copies of it are still around in a great variety of our painkillers—codeine and morphine, of course, and Vicodin, Percocet,