Opium (9 page)

Sir Walter Scott took laudanum whilst writing
The Bride of Lammermoor,
his doctor prescribing 6 grains of laudanum a day for a painful stomach complaint. Scott disliked opium for it depressed him and, to overcome its effects, he took long morning horse-rides to rid himself of what he called ‘the accursed vapours'. When the novel was finished, and Scott read the manuscript, he stated he could remember not one incident, character or conversation from the story. As Scott's method of working was to ‘lie in bed in the mornings simmering over things for an hour or so before I get up – and there's the time when I am dressing to overhaul my half-sleeping, half-waking project de chapitre – and when I get the paper before me, it commonly runs off pretty easily', it is no wonder
The Bride of Lammermoor
was so alien to its author he would be waking and writing after a night of opium depression, a state superbly described in the heroine of the novel, Lucy Ashton, whose neurosis and anxiety lead to insanity.

That neither Wilkie Collins nor Sir Walter Scott recognised their own work does not suggest opium gave them something which had not originally existed within them in the first place. Collins had researched gemmology, India and somnambulism before embarking upon his novel and the historical background and geographical settings of Scott's tale were familiar to him. Just as De Quincey had pointed out, if one talked of oxen, opium represented them: here were sustained examples of knowledge being recycled by opium.

Other writers were indebted and, in some instances, enslaved to opium. As Wilkie Collins reported, Bulwer Lytton took opium as a tranquilliser and stimulant, most probably introduced to it as a painkiller for the excruciating earaches he experienced throughout his life: his elder brother, who lived in Constantinople, might have prompted his first dose, for he suffered from migraines and was an addict who described the effects of taking opium as being like having one's soul rubbed down with silk. Bramwell Brontë, the brother of the Brontë sisters, was an addict, whilst Byron and Shelley were occasional users. James Thomson experimented with it but he was to die from alcoholism whilst, towards the end of the nineteenth century, the poet Francis Thompson was heavily addicted. Baudelaire, born in 1821, was a heavy hashish user for many years but he turned late in life to opium, his poetry paying homage to it. There are reasons to consider others as candidates for opium usage: Hector Berlioz, Gérard de Nerval and, in later years, Arthur Rimbaud and Maurice Rollinat were also either addicted or influenced by it.

It is fair to say most writers came across opium in the first place as an anodyne and only subsequently fell under its sway, the dreams and nightmares weaving themselves into their work often to become an essential and unavoidable part of it. Yet there were those who regarded opium as a boon to their writing, who had been afforded the opportunity of giving it up but chose to keep on with it. For them, opium was a path to the unattainable, a doorway into the cosmos. None realised, or chose to heed, De Quincey's remarks that opium only displayed what was already in the mind.

For many addicted writers, opium did little to affect their characters adversely. They lived artistically successful lives, often becoming wealthy from their writings. There were those, like the guilt-ridden Coleridge, for whom addiction was a burden but they were of sufficiently strong will not to let the depression and despair of addiction oppress them.

On the other hand, there were those who were poor or burdened with the worries of everyday survival, and perhaps weak of character, who were changed by opium. They could become moody, sullen, mercurial of spirits and even suicidal, were often tormented, with their work showing this torment seething in them: a good example is Edgar Allen Poe, the American writer whose character was undermined by both opium and alcohol.

For over a century, a controversy has raged about whether or not Poe was an opium addict for at least a part of his life. Certainly, he was an opium user if not actually addicted and his work shows the unmistakable signs of opium: four of his fictional heroes are addicts. Poe tried to commit suicide by overdosing and his sister recorded often seeing him in a sad state from opium. Orphaned at the age of three and adopted by his Scots godfather who lived in Richmond, Virginia, Poe was partly educated in London, later attending the University of Virginia which he had to leave, broken by gambling debts. In 1831, he was dishonourably discharged from West Point Military Academy for deliberate neglect of his duties. Turning to journalism, he became a heavy drinker with an unstable temperament which both addictions eroded to such an extent he could not cope with his financial worries, his inner despair, the demands of his creativity and his wife's fatal consumption. He quarrelled with landlords and contemporaries – his most notorious feud was with Henry Longfellow – and died tragically as a result of wounds received in a drunken brawl in Baltimore in 1849 with, it is thought, electioneering hooligans: some claim he was drugged by his attackers but it is just as likely he was either drunk or had taken opium.

Whether through literature, personal experience or observing the everyday world around them, there was hardy a person alive in Europe or the immigrant populations of North America at the time who was not well acquainted with opium. De Quincey and his social peers may have used it for pleasure as well as a release from pain – and marvelled at its heightened dreams – but there were many hundreds of thousands of common folk for whom opium was the only way out of the drudgery of a harsh life.

4

Poverty, Potions and Poppy-heads

Throughout the nineteenth century, opium was as widely used in Britain, Western Europe and America as aspirin or paracetamol are today – if not more so – and it was the main ingredient of a vast range of medicines, patent medicines and quack ‘remedies'.

The extensive use of opium was staggering. As Berridge and Edwards outlined in
Opium and the People,
consumption in Britain increased between 1831 and 1859 at an average rate of 2.4 per cent per annum. Imports rose from around 91,000 pounds (41,300 kilograms) in 1830 to 280,000 pounds (127,000 kilograms) in 1860, re-exported opium rising from 41,000 pounds (18,600 kilograms) to 151,000 pounds (68,500 kilograms), more than half selling to America.

Despite opium production in India, which was largely under British control, most of the importation came from Turkey, which was deemed to manufacture a higher-quality product. Indian opium had a low morphine content – at 4–6 per cent – which made it unsuitable for British pharmaceutical use: Turkish opium had a 10–13 per cent morphine content and could easily be exported through Smyrna, which had long been an important trading centre, used particularly by the British who had established commercial links with Turkey since the founding of the Levant Company in 1581.

The Ottoman Empire was a large market for British cotton goods, which were traded for corn, silk, raisins, wool, sponges and opium: between 1827 and 1869, 80 to 90 per cent of all imported opium was Turkish. The trading level never dropped below 70 per cent even with the advent on the market of Persian opium which was imported direct from Persia or via Constantinople where it was repackaged to look like the Turkish variety.

The Turkish near-monopoly on opium was not without detractors. In 1829, a Dr Webster stated quite bluntly that, if possible, opium should be grown in and obtained from a British colony, removing the reliance upon what he termed ‘the rascally Turks'. Such a wish was, however, beyond the bounds of fulfilment. The trade was too well established to be overturned by jingoistic considerations.

At first, the trading lines followed the old silk and spice routes by way of the Low Countries, France, Germany, Gibraltar and Malta and, of course, Italy, where Venice was in the last stages of decline as a trading power. In time, alternative routes developed. Marseilles became a major shipment centre, a position it held until the 1970s. Rotterdam and Amsterdam also developed into maritime drugs centres, which they remain to this day. Yet, by 1850, most opium was shipped direct from Turkey aboard British vessels, doing away with transhipment and foreign tariff charges.

In Britain, Liverpool, Dover and Bristol were all opium ports, yet the main centre for trading in Europe was London where a cartel of importers controlled the business. Initially, these merchants were those whose firms were descended from the Levant Company: when the company finally closed in 1825, the cartel disintegrated, leaving opium susceptible to free trade. Wholesale importers moved in, purchasing opium both by private deal and at auction. As in any commodity market, there were also spot buyers who speculated when they saw prices favourably low but who were not dedicated opium traders.

The centre of opium business was around Mincing Lane in London, where 90 per cent of the trade was conducted. It had been an important market-place since the sixteenth century but, by the mid-1700s, it was associated primarily with opium and, to a lesser extent, other drugs. Opium transactions were sealed in Garraway's Coffee House, near the Royal Exchange, by a system known as ‘buying by the candle'. A small candle was lit at the start of an auction and bids accepted until the wick burnt away, at which point the highest bid for the consignment ‘under the candle' was accepted. Auctions took place fortnightly, began at 10.30 in the morning and were attended by about 100 buyers and brokers who bid throughout the day.

On occasion, deals were arranged between the London drug wholesale houses, such as the Apothecaries' Company or Allen and Hanburys, and individual brokers of whom there were about thirty operating in London. The method of business was thus: every Saturday, a list was published in the counting house of the Apothecaries' Company providing notice of forthcoming requirements. Brokers submitted samples the following Tuesday. The company's Buying Committee tested the samples and ordered accordingly. In these circumstances, cargoes in bond were sold prior to customs clearance.

Trading in opium required specific commercial expertise and the rewards could be high, although so too could be the risks. Mincing Lane brokers and dealers seldom worked under a 50 per cent profit margin, which could rise to 100 per cent, but it could just as readily fall. As with any agricultural commodity, prices fluctuated widely according to growing and harvest conditions and the quality of the produce. A second element reducing profit margins was the publication of a monthly current prices list allowing end-buyers, such as chemists, to shop around for the best deal. Other factors stabilising prices were the removal of import duties, the increasing efficiency of business with the advent of postage and railway parcel services and the gradual supplanting of the general import merchant by the dedicated opium dealer. A final influence upon international pricing was the encouragement by producer-governments which advocated switching peasant farming from less commercial and more risky cash crops to opium, thus improving their people's income and lives, simultaneously increasing local tax revenue.

Prices varied widely. Opium was liable to an import duty of 9 shillings per pound until 1828, then 4s per pound to 1836, when it was cut to 1s per pound, the level at which the duty remained until a free-trade agreement removed it in 1860. The reduction and abolition of tax, linked to increasing import quantities, brought the wholesale price consistently down for much of the nineteenth century.

In 1818, with duty at 9s, Turkish opium wholesaled for about £1 per pound ex-tax, 30s per pound tax paid: in 1851, the wholesale price was 21s per pound, tax paid. Substandard or poorer quality opium, such as Egyptian, was priced in 1858 at 6s 8d per pound, ex-tax. Needless to say, poor harvests or the loss of a cargo (as in 1865, when the SS
Crimean
ran aground off Smyrna with a cargo of several tonnes of opium) caused price fluctuations but, in general, the cost of opium did not rise more than 25 per cent in a century to 1900.

Despite the modest pricing of opium, there were those who sought ways to produce it without suffering import taxes or dealing with Webster's ‘rascally Turks'. Between 1740 and 1830, attempts were made to grow poppies and harvest opium in Britain.

The opium poppy was an established wild plant in some parts of Britain and Ireland well before the eighteenth century. Whether it was naturally indigenous or had been introduced is uncertain but it was to be found, most notably in the Fens (the low-lying marshlands of Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire) where it was used to make poppy-head tea and a variety of folk remedies.

The methods of cultivation were first described by a Mr Arnot in 1742:

What I have found most successful is to trench a spot of new rich ground, where Poppies had not grown the preceding year; for if they are continued several years on the same Ground they degenerate. A chusing the ripest and whitest Seed of the great single-flowered Turkey Poppy, I sow it in the month of March very thin and superficially in Drills at two Foot Distance each, to allow Place for Weeding, etc. As soon as the young Plants spring up, I take most of them away, leaving only the strongest most thriving Plants at about a Foot distant from each other.

The first person in Britain to produce opium was Dr Alston, Professor of Botany and Materia Medica at the University of Edinburgh. He achieved this is the 1730s, using the white poppy because of its large pods, although it was not until 1742 that he published the fact.

From 1763, the Society of Arts began actively to promote the study of medicinal plants, starting with the cultivation of rhubarb and offering a gold medal for new discoveries. Soon the society's interest turned towards the poppy and opium, prompted by a winner of a 50-guinea prize, John Ball, who produced home-grown opium. Encouraged by Ball's success and spurred on by a new prize of 50 guineas plus a gold medal for the production of 20 pounds of raw opium, Thomas Jones set 5 acres of ground near Enfield, north of London, in 1794. Despite problems with weeds and inclement weather, he succeeded in 1800 in producing 21 pounds of raw opium and took the prize.