“Chinese Opiate Addiction and American Perceptions, 1815–1860”

By Kelly Gray

In 1857, a writer for Harper’s Weekly noted that “Whoever has sojourned for a season among Chinese or Hindoos—making their grotesque customs and sensual vices his recreation or his thoughtful study—has enjoyed hourly opportunities to become familiar with the physiognomy of the confirmed opium set.” This physiognomy included bloodshot eyes, a bewildered expression, and sniffling “as with an incipient influenza.” The writer then described scenes from such a sojourn, such as addicts in Hong Kong “stretching their lazy lengths on paper mattresses” while taking “sickening puffs of the insane drug.” But, he continued, one did not have to be among the “Chinese or Hindoos” to see opium’s impact, because “John Chinaman’s curse” also prevailed in New York, among all classes. Addicts were “in workshops and behind counters,” “in doctors’ offices, and in the pulpit,” “in Fifth-Avenue drawing rooms and opera-stalls, as well as at firemen’s halls and the third tier of Purdy’s National Theatre.” Although omnipresent, they suffered silently and were desperate for help. Upon the publication of a previous article about domestic addiction, “a number of persons” had written to the author, “confessing their bondage to the unsparing fiend of opium … and imploring” the writer “to help and save them.”Regardless of whether the Harper’s writer was correct in his assertions, the domestic circumstances that he suggested reflected an emerging, painful reality. Opium addiction in America was on the rise.[1]

Americans long believed that opiate addiction was not an American problem, and in truth, addicts were only a small portion of the population in the Early Republic. Willard Phillips reviewed Englishman Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater for the North American Review in 1824,and he saw the memoir “more as an object of taste and literary curiosity” than as a cautionary tale, as he believed that “very few persons, if any, in this country, abandon themselves to the use of opium as a luxury.” He also did not fear “this species of intemperance” taking hold in the future.[2] In 1830’s Essay on Temperance, Edward Hitchcock concurred that there were “few genuine opium eaters among us,” and three years later a writer for the Boston Medical and Surgical Journalagreed that “There are not many in this country addicted to the free and constant use of opium.”[3] David Courtwright has estimated that, before 1842, there were fewer than eleven thousand American opiate addicts in a population of just under eight million.[4] Yet there were certainly some. In the Revolutionary era, French immigrant turned American farmer J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur noted that many women on Nantucket took a “dose of opium every morning” and “would be at a loss how to live without this indulgence.”[5] And in February 1839, the editor of the Boston Medical and Surgical Journalinsisted that “The secret consumers of opium in the United States are vastly more numerous than is suspected” and that opium-eating was particularly prevalent among the rich, who could afford to “gratify the propensity without restraint.”[6]

To understand why American denial of domestic addiction was so vehement, however, one must regard it in an international context. Such attention indicates the great degree to which the notion of American exceptionalism influenced American attitudes toward addiction. Where opium was concerned, Americans saw themselves as superior to both Asians and Britons. They initially associated drug addiction with Asian populations and saw addicts’ behavior as the inverse of middle-class ideals. Asian addicts—mainly men—were neither diligent nor sober. They also seemed to lack self-respect, because they indulged in opium in public venues. And opium rendered them quiet and indifferent, qualities that Americans would have identified as feminine. Some British addicts, meanwhile, publicized their struggles with opium. In addition, Great Britain aggressively pursued the opium trade in China—despite its illegality—and thus appeared to lack morality. As mentioned, there were American addicts, and American merchants were involved in the trade. But members of both groups tended to keep their behavior secret, to avoid criticism. Consequently, other Americans saw themselves as stronger than Asians and more moral than Britons. When confronted with drug dependence among native-born Americans, many were shocked but maintained that such addicts were more moral and deserving of sympathy than were their foreign counterparts, because most were initially prescribed the drug by doctors. Thus, from their perspective, the notion of “American exceptionalism” endured. They did not know, however, that American success at the time owed, in part, to the generosity of wealthy American opium merchants, who became philanthropists upon their return to the U. S.

Americans sometimes identified addiction with Turks or with the British, but mostly they identified it with China. As the Harper’s writer suggested, many Western travelers viewed Asian addicts much as they viewed the Parthenon and the Tower of London elsewhere—they identified them with their locales and consequently sought them out. Dr. H. Willis Baxley relieved the monotony of a voyage across the Pacific by observing the habits of the Chinese aboard, including their “use of chopsticks” and their “oblivious enjoyment of opium smoking.”[7] This reference suggests that the smoking was interesting because it was novel—and because it was in plain view. Others also presented such observations as a kind of sightseeing. George Francis Train visited an opium den in China. In his 1857 travel account, he described a “dozen poor besotted devils” who paid “one cent” for opium in a cup “about the size of a thimble.” Train observed the addicts, wrote about them, and invited his readers to view them as well. “Go into one of these hells,” he suggested, “if you want to see what effect opium has upon those who indulge in it to excess.”[8] The public use of opium reinforced the stereotype in Western minds. As Stuart Creighton Miller has observed, the opium pipe “became as much a symbol of Chinese culture as the queue or the tea cup,” and publications after the first Opium War gave readers the impression that “Chinese adults of all classes” were addicts. When describing opium addiction on Nantucket, Crèvecoeur referred to it as “the Asiatic custom.”[9] And it was not just American travelers or even adults who had this perception. In 1850, students in three New York City public schools were asked to write down what they knew about China. Among the students whose comments departed from aspects such as population and commercial products, half cited opium addiction.[10]

Meanwhile, many Americans believed that one would know an addict by his unhealthy appearance and early demise. The notion, however, is suspect. A writer for the Presbyterian Princeton Review succinctly stated a popular belief regarding the addict’s fate that suggested a very public fall. After the initial “exhilaration” of the drug, the addict would become weak. He “appears sallow, his flesh dries up and sticks close to his bones. Poverty comes after idleness and debauchery. He sells house and land, pawns his clothes, and finally his wife and children.” Ultimately, “death comes to relieve him of his existence.”[11] With such images of addicts, many may have assumed that there were no domestic addicts, because their state would be obvious. But there is evidence that addicts could not always be identified. Writer John Lofland was an opium addict in the 1820s, yet he “maintained absolute secrecy and apparent health,” according to biographer William Smithers.[12] Although Dr. Christison, a Scottish physician, would not state that opium could be “indulged in with entire impunity,” he insisted that the drug’s “injurious effects are often exceedingly slow in taking place” and the addict’s system “will hold out for a wonderful period against its destructive influence.” He knew, for example, of a seventy-year-old woman who had taken laudanum every day for forty years.[13]

Given opium’s prevalent use as a medicine in the U. S., it is small wonder that there were American addicts. In the early nineteenth century, opium was one of the most frequently prescribed drugs in the country.[14] Nicknamed “God’s own medicine,” it was the only drug that Oliver Wendell Holmes saw as invaluable. It did not cure ailments but was a painkiller without peer. For a Revolutionary War soldier, it eased the excruciating experience of having a leg amputated.[15] “Liberal doses of laudanum”—opium mixed with alcohol—assuaged Alexander Hamilton’s pain in his last twenty-four hours, following his duel with Aaron Burr.[16]

Overwhelmingly, antebellum American addicts began taking some form of opium for medicinal purposes, then could not easily discontinue its use. Opiates lessened the pain for pregnant women, but new mothers often had difficulty kicking the habit.[17] Molly Carroll—a member of a prominent Maryland family—began taking laudanum in 1776 to cure insomnia. Three years later, her father implored her husband to “‘Tel[l] Her I beg Her never to touch Laudanum wh[ich] I hear she stil[l] takes.’”[18] John Lofland became “violently ill” after eating pickles aboard a ship in 1820 and was given laudanumto allay his pain and help him sleep. His system recovered, but his craving for laudanum endured, and he remained an addict for twenty-seven years, at which point a doctor successfully forbade every pharmacist in town from selling Lofland the drug.[19]

American addicts were ashamed of their condition. In 1833, the Boston Medical and Surgical Journaldescribed a typical American laudanum addict. She began taking the drug when a doctor prescribed it “to quiet some slight degree of nervous irritation,” then came to depend on it for “many years,” though “she had never … been in the least degree overexcitedby it.” “No one”—not even her husband—suspected her addiction. The woman wanted to stop taking the drug, but attempts to lessen her dosage made her ill.[20] Avoiding the agony of withdrawal, therefore, was the goal, rather than the pursuit of “overexcitement,” and most American addicts took the drug “not for the purpose of creating pleasure, but of mitigating pain in the severest degree.”[21] Withdrawal could bring “vomiting, stomach cramps, and excruciating pains in the head and limbs, ... extreme nervousness, fits of uncontrollable weeping, fear, shame, anger, and dreadful nightmares.”[22]

American addicts tended to have “a strong sense of the impropriety” of the practice,[23] and sometimes, even the doctor was none the wiser. “It not unfrequently happens,” a writer for the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal asserted in 1832, “that a physician attends a patient in the daily use of this indulgence, and remains entirely ignorant of its existence.”[24] The woman’s ability to remain a productive member of society—so long as she had access to laudanum—was also typical. The writer theorized that the woman’s situation was the “most common” type of opium addiction in America as well as “that which calls most loudly for the sympathy and aid of the humane physician.”[25]

Writings about opium focused on foreign addicts, however, and were of dubious accuracy. In 1832, a writer for the Boston Medical and Surgical Journalacknowledged that writings about opium emphasized foreign settings. He characterized information on the drug’s dangers as “either vague and general, as the accounts of travellers who have witnessed its effects in the East, or fanciful and exaggerated, as is the case with the Confessions of an Opium-eater.” The author did, however, look to Asia to challenge the notion that opium use caused constipation, noting that “opium-eaters of the East are not compelled to use cathartic medicine.”[26] Such comments suggest the strong inclination of Americans to think of Asians when they thought of opium.

Sympathy for the few American addicts, however, did not translate into sympathy for Asian opium users. Not only was addiction in America an obscure concern, but American and Asian addicts differed dramatically. While most American addictions began under a doctor’s order, Eastern addiction was done for recreational purposes. Addiction in China was public, was not begun under a physician’s advice, and rendered addicts completely unproductive for several hours. The author who described the female addict defined “opium eaters” only as those addicts “who took it originally as a medicine for some nervous affection, and continue it from necessity, rather than from choice.” He had “no knowledge” of people who “take opium for purposes of unnatural excitement and inebriation,” but asserted that such people “need less of our sympathy, and would excite us less to exertions in their behalf.”[27]In his opinion, all opium addicts were not created equal.

While the furtive nature of American opium addiction indicates the users’ embarrassment, Asian addiction—maintained in public opium dens—suggested shamelessness. They did not hide themselves, and they could not hide the smell of the drug. While in China, the Rev. William Wentworth shared sleeping quarters with some natives, several of whom smoked opium. “The fumes of the burning drug diffused a sickening odor throughout the apartment,” he recalled.[28] As much as Americans condemned Britain’s role in the opium trade, they did not consequently excuse Chinese addiction. And while American addicts kept taking opium to avoid withdrawal and to maintain their routines, Asian addicts smoked the drug to “produce intoxication” and became completely unproductive. “The images which flit before his diseased imagination, are exquisite, brilliant, heavenly,” and while under the influence of the drug, “all care was banished,” according to Edmund Roberts.[29]

And while Americans felt superior to British and Asian addicts, they also looked down on Great Britain for the nation’s preeminent role in the illegal opium trade with China. In 1839, when the Chinese government tried to eradicate the trade, Britain fought its first Opium War with the nation to ensure continued acceptance of the drug. Americans excoriated the British for pursuing profit over morality. As with addiction, however, Americans were stealthily involved in the trade. There are legitimate reasons as to why American involvement in the trade received little attention. In part, as with addiction, it was a matter of scale. The British traffic in opium to China dwarfed that of American merchants. And while the British government would fight a war to preserve the trade, American merchants endured the early phases of the opium crackdown with almost no protection from the U.S. government.[30] It was also a matter of visibility. American opium merchants knew that their countrymen would object to the trade, and most kept quiet about their role in it. People back home knew, simply, that they were China merchants. When they knew more, there was trouble. In 1844’s Remarks on China and the China Trade, merchant Robert Bennett Forbes tried to defend the commerce and the war. A writer for the North American Review criticized Forbes for treating the topic “only as a great commercial and political question” and leaving “its moral aspect … entirely out of view.”[31]Fellow merchant Thomas Handasyd Perkins, meanwhile, never let his fellow Bostonians know that he had been an opium merchant in China. The intentional nature of the cover-up seems clear; his son-in-law penned a biography of Perkins in 1856, but the 269-page-long work never mentioned opium, despite its prominent role in his business dealings.[32]

During the Opium War, Americans back home were appalled at British willingness to pursue the opium trade in China openly and to go to war to protect it. Most Americans who commented on the war sided strongly with the Chinese and criticized British determination to continue the trade “at the mouth of the cannon.”[33] A writer for the Southern Literary Messenger explained that the Chinese and British fought “because the Chinese are unwilling to poison themselves with [Britain’s] opium.”[34] In the working-class journal The Radical,editor George H. Evansnoted that “British mercenaries” had “butchered from five to ten thousands of the Chinese, compelled the Chinese government to take British opium, and to pay six millions of pounds sterling and the expenses of their resistance to Victoria’s modest demand. So much for the progress of tyranny!”[35] In 1842, a writer for the Southern Quarterly Review insisted that British abuses in its empire and “rapacity” in China “should unite all civilized nations against her, as a government of universal piracies.”[36] The writer suggested a clear demarcation between uncivilized nations, such as Britain, and civilized nations that could reasonably judge others, such as the United States. George Francis Train agreed. “Morally,” he wrote of Great Britain, “what can be said in its favor?”[37] Overall, Americans judged British behavior in pursuing the opium trade in China as immoral and unchristian.