Opium

by Martin Booth

  For Dickens, opium was a symbol of degeneracy, of a surrender of basic human values, a corruption of decency. A man of double standards – Dickens proclaimed a healthy Christian morality but maintained a secret mistress and a bastard child – it is not remarkable he wrote so powerfully and critically about an aspect of society of which, like infidelity, he had some insider’s knowledge. In the last years of his life, when he was writing the story of Edwin Drood, he frequently took laudanum, and not just to relieve pain. On a reading tour of America in 1867, he dosed himself to calm his nerves after an emotive public reading of the death of Tiny Tim from A Christmas Carol and used it for some months as a cough mixture. Furthermore, Dickens researched the story by visiting the slums of London with the police where he saw an old crone smoking opium from a home-made pipe, a scene he used in the novel.

  Dickens’s novel introduced an intolerance of opium and opium dens but, in 1891, a new novel appeared in which an opium den was used as the setting for the dramatic, blasphemous revelation of man’s inner evil. It was Oscar Wilde’s famous tale, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Gray, the main character, lives two parallel lives. He is on one plane a witty, handsome and charming man yet he seduces young women and corrupts young men. The portrait of himself as a young man ages as time goes by whilst Gray himself does not. The mockery of the picture prompts him to murder its artist, by which act he sees himself as set apart from civilised society. In an attempt to escape the realisation of the killing, he goes to a London opium den ‘where one could buy oblivion’. In the den, however, Gray meets not oblivion but two of his former despoiled companions driven to addiction by his actions. One is intent on killing Gray but he does not: he cannot believe the man standing before him is forty years old. Gray is spared, saved by the picture which does his ageing for him, but he is reminded of his past and realises there is no escape from it. The opium, from which there was also no escape, is an image of entrapment: no amount of opium can alter the truth.

  A year after Wilde’s story was published, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote of the effects of opium addiction in one of his Sherlock Holmes tales, The Man with the Twisted Lip. The story starts with Dr Watson entering an opium den in the East End of London to rescue an addict friend. There he meets Holmes, in disguise, who is investigating the disappearance of a respectable businessman, Neville St Clair, whom it is believed has been kidnapped and robbed by a deformed beggar, the man of the title. The beggar is duly arrested and put in gaol. Holmes, after a night considering the case, rushes to the police cells where he washes the beggar’s face to find the cripple is St Clair in disguise. St Clair is, in fact, not a businessman at all. Unknown to his wife, who sees him leave for the office every day, he is a highly successful beggar. The opium den is used by him as a base where he might change from his suit and top hat into rags, making himself up to appear physically repugnant. The opium den, therefore, becomes an image for transformation from truth into deceit, just as it was for the addict customers who escaped reality there.

  Dr Watson’s visit to the den was not out of character for a middle class Victorian professional man. Such was public curiosity about the naughty side of life, opium dens actually drew not only curious voyeurs but even tourists doing the sights of London.

  For many, however, the dens were a sign of decadence and contact with Chinamen, as with other coloured races, was seen as socially polluting. That this commingling might involve the sensuality of opium as well was abhorrent and rumours of debauchery and racial degeneracy abounded. They were unfounded. There was little meeting of East and West in the opium dens of London: the working-class East Enders – dockers, stevedores, prostitutes, sailors and longshoremen – did not smoke opium. They kept to their own forms of opiates, along with gin and ale.

  Despite the fact opium had been taken for pleasure for decades, the idea grew up that such drug taking signified deviant or eccentric behaviour. Artists, painters and writers, such as Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, occasionally smoked opium: Wilde, in particular, was known not only for his absinthe drinking but also his Egyptian cigarettes containing tobacco soaked in opium tincture. Yet even at their most numerous, these bohemians were a very small group.

  For the first decades of the twentieth century, opium slipped from the limelight. However, after the Great War, matters changed. Drugs returned to the social agenda as a serious social menace: that addiction at the time was falling was by the way.

  Whipped up by the press, encouraged by popular ‘penny dreadful’ novels and films, often made in America, the public was inundated with what would now be termed hype, much of it inaccurate. Narcotics were seen to have escaped from London’s East End to infect the nation, depraving the young who fell for their insidious charms. Panic ensued.

  The increase in the Chinese population fuelled this panic. There were about 1300 Chinese in Britain in 1911: by 1921, there were nearly 3000. Compared to America, or even France, where there were large numbers of Sino-French exchange student workers (Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping amongst them), this total was minuscule but it was sufficient to alarm the public. Journalists wrote sensationalistic articles about opium dens, white girls in slavery and Chinese criminal conspiracies bent on spreading vice to corrupt the English. When, in 1918, the actress Billie Carleton was found dead in her flat, the press had a field day: the case contained all the elements they wanted – sex, drug use and an opium den. Generally speaking, however, it was all rubbish. The only white girls to be involved with the Chinese were those who had married them, there being a considerable shortage of women in Chinese circles.

  The dangers of opium, sex and crime soon became the stock-in-trade for pulp-fiction writers. One writer, called Arthur Ward, had visited Limehouse. There he saw a Chinese man who gave him a brief but incisive idea. Writing as Sax Rohmer, Ward invented the arch-villain, Dr Fu Manchu.

  First appearing in 1913, Dr Fu Manchu embodied all the evil the public saw in the Chinese. He was set on the domination of the West, used opium against his enemies and was himself an addict. Ward may have been biased but he knew a good character when he saw one and not all his inventions were fictional: in one story, a fictional drug dealer called King was based upon a real-life one in London who went by the name of Brilliant Chang. A significant number of the stories were also filmed, spreading the image of the Chinese as all being potential Fu Manchus.

  Other authors jumped on Ward’s bandwagon. Newspapers published details of sex and drugs and ‘dance dope dens’ where a ‘sickening crowd of young aliens’ preyed on ‘pretty, underdressed’ English girls. Aleister Crowley – named by the press as the wickedest man in the world for his drug taking, sexual perversions and occult reputation – wrote of heroin and cocaine addiction in his Diary of a Drug Fiend, released in 1922. In him, the press had just the scapegoat they needed and they laboured the point off and on for twenty-five years. Due to a chequered career which included operating an occult temple in Sicily, engaging in sexual magic with both male and female partners, allegedly eating babies as part of satanic rituals, running a troupe of dancers called ‘The Ragged Rag-Time Girls’ and indulging in drug taking which included smoking opium, sniffing cocaine, eating hashish and swallowing liberal doses of laudanum, veronal and anhalonium, as well as smoking and later injecting heroin, he was regarded as the archetypal drug fiend. Severely addicted, Crowley was to die impoverished in Hastings in 1947, a heroin addict to the grave.

  The sense of danger was communicated to an even wider audience through the cinema. Hollywood and British-made Fu Manchu films, which were still in production in the 1960s, famously starring Christopher Lee and Tsai Chin, did much to encourage fear: real-life Tinseltown tales, such as that of Wallace Reid, did more.

  These scandals gave the media the ability to shape public opinion, the man in the street being informed (or more often mis-informed) by sensation-hungry, circulation-driven editors. The Chinese, the most law-abiding ethnic minority, were hounded as drug-sodden corrupters
of youth. Although few people in Britain ever came upon any drugs other than their doctor’s prescription, a public outcry built to demand government action.

  No legislation against Chinese smoking opium existed until 1909 when the London County Council passed a by-law prohibiting opium smoking in seamen’s boarding houses, but it was another seven years before opium was regarded as a narcotic rather than a poison. The Hague Conference of 1911, however, changed things. Britain became obligated to legislate and a scandal in 1916 revolving around cocaine being supplied to Canadian troops stationed in Britain brought about a seminal piece of legislation, known as DORA 40B, the acronym drawn from Regulation 40B of the Defence of the Realm Act. It made supplying drugs to troops in wartime a serious offence and was then extended to apply to civilians, possession without a doctor’s prescription becoming a crime.

  Under the drug clauses in the Treaty of Versailles, Britain was obligated to legislate again and, in 1920, the Dangerous Drugs Act entered the statute books. It was basically DORA 40B altered to meet the demands of international opium legislation.

  Armed with the law, the police set about a successful and sustained crackdown. Hundreds of prosecutions were made, one of the high points being the arrest and conviction of Brilliant Chang in 1924, followed by his deportation after serving a prison sentence, in 1926. Drug trafficking in Britain was virtually at an end, drug usage dropping to the level of less than a dozen convictions per annum whilst certification of exports prevented illegal international traffic in British-manufactured morphine: but there was one loophole in the Dangerous Drugs Act which permitted doctors to prescribe for addiction without necessarily trying to cure it. The phraseology in the act was legally ambiguous so, in the same year as Chang was arrested, the Ministry of Health established a committee to address the problem.

  The Rolleston Committee, which published its report in 1926, was named after its chairman, Sir Henry Rolleston, President of the Royal College of Physicians. Addicts were to be considered patients not criminals and it was agreed a doctor could maintain an addiction without fear of prosecution if the patient could not otherwise survive. These decisions have shaped attitudes towards addiction in Britain ever since because, in effect, the committee had made it official policy to treat addiction as a medical rather than a law enforcement matter.

  Mercifully, Rolleston did not imitate the Harrison Act and thus prevented Britain from following the USA. Most British addicts continued to obtain their supplies through doctors and avoided reliance on criminal dealers. They were also not prosecuted or sent to state institutions.

  Recreational drug use in Britain through the late 1920s and 1930s was insignificant. The Chinese smoked opium in their tiny communities but it did not travel nation-wide with them. Some upper-class and artistic or theatrical people took drugs, but mostly cocaine. Heroin was rarely seen.

  There were other reasons for the low addiction rates in Britain. First, alcohol was not prohibited, as it was in the USA. Second, society in British cities was more or less stable whereas in America it was in a state of considerable flux with wave after wave of immigrant arrivals, youth gangs and crime groups running the streets.

  By the late 1930s, drugs were all but absent from the press and the cinema. People had other concerns with the Depression, the rise of national socialism in Germany and the inexorable approach of war. The 1930s were, in effect, a lull before the post-war drug storm.

  In the literary and artistic worlds, however, interest in opium remained. In the 1930s, Aldous Huxley started to become intrigued by drugs and put them as a central theme in his seminal novel, Brave New World, published in 1932. Opium usage was common amongst European intellectuals before and immediately after the Second World War. Raymond Radiguet, Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apolinnaire, Francis Poulenc, Georges Auric, Louis Laloy, Jean Cocteau and many of the Surrealists were smokers or users, if not addicts. Laloy went so far as to publish a book on the subject, Le Livre de la Fumée, which was an opium smoking manual. It became a best-seller and is said to have been the instigation for the rise of opium smoking in fashionable European society between the world wars.

  Yet the most famous modern descriptions of opium smoking were given by Graham Greene who first smoked opium in 1951 in Vietnam and developed a passion for it as an antidote to his fits of deep depression: but he was never addicted. Most of his opium experiences were undertaken in the opium dens (or fumeries) of French Indo-China although, on occasion, he was invited to smoke with acquaintances. He was fascinated, as many Europeans were, by the ritual of opium smoking, the ambience of the den with its subdued lights, burning opium lamps and young girls who prepared the pipes.

  The first few pipes left Greene drowsy but the next few revitalised his mind, making him alert yet pacific. It was after his first smoking experience that he underwent what smokers referred to as a ‘white opium night’. He lay awake and was then suddenly plunged into a deep, narcotic sleep which seemed to last for hours but, in fact, lasted only twenty minutes. Waking again, he stayed conscious for a short while before, once more, dropping into a long sleep ‘compressed’ into minutes. On another occasion, Greene and a friend took a young girl from an opium den back to their hotel in Hanoi: inevitably, both men were unable to enjoy the girl sexually because their opium smoking had killed their sexual capability. Indeed, Greene was to write of what every addict already knew, that opium was a grand substitute for sex and suppressed desire.

  For Greene, opium was an escape from reality, a means of suppressing depression, fear and self-loathing and an aid to his literature. He described smoking a pipe in his novel, The Quiet American, set in Vietnam before the start of the Vietnam War, closely basing the description on personal experience. He later also wrote about opium smoking in his autobiographical Ways of Escape. Needless to say, he only got out of it what he put into it, as De Quincey had suggested. Greene, obsessed at the time with sex, his mistress Catherine Walston and his abiding love–hate relationship with the Roman Catholic faith, had opium dreams mingling erotic sex with religion, exotic Eastern scenes, strange architectural shapes, the Devil himself and places with which he was familiar (such as the entrance to a gentleman’s club in St James’s Street, London), all thrown together with a rapid passing of time and the colour gold in the form of coins.

  Opium gave The Quiet American a certain risqué quality. Readers were attracted to the book’s romantic setting and the vice of opium smoking just as previous generations had been by the writings of Coleridge or Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Barrett Browning or George Crabbe, Dickens, Wilde and the pulp fiction authors.

  Government reports in Britain in the immediate post-war years believed drug addiction was restricted to two groups: a quarter of all registered addicts were in the medical profession, the remainder being in what was termed the alien population, covering Chinese and black immigrants in urban areas. The founding of jazz clubs in wartime London played a significant part in addiction, providing a multi-racial milieu where drugs were used and from which, after the war, they spread, a doctor writing in 1956, ‘the addicts we have in this country … are nearly all instrumentalists in jazz bands.’

  Every now and then, the press commented upon the growth of drug use but the authorities generally tended to ignore these early warnings, although the Home Office began to record heroin addicts as a separate category in 1954 and had fifty-seven listed. The number increased slowly in the 1950s but heroin was certainly not a problem.

  Only around 1960 did matters change in both Britain and Western Europe, when an American-style pattern of addiction started to appear with pushers actively creating new addicts, particularly teenagers, most often males. Morphine use dropped and all but disappeared. Heroin was ‘in’. Over a matter of two years, addict numbers rose from around 250 to several thousand.

  A catalyst for this rapid increase was the number of heroin addicts fleeing to Europe, especially Britain, to escape a harsh penal code for drug offences introduced in Canada in 1958. By 1962, s
eventy Canadian addicts – a fair proportion of them having narcotic-related criminal records – had arrived, and yet they were not necessarily the cause but merely a symptom of the problem.

  Teenagers were changing. They had more freedom, more spending power and more social status than ever before. A teenage culture developed on the back of pop music and from this extended a drug subculture which started in London and then spread to other cities. A market in heroin developed and the word ‘junkie’ entered everyday English. Although the number of addicts remained small by comparison with the USA – about 3000 existed in 1969 – it was five times the 1961 figure and did not augur well for the future.

  The Ministry of Health convened the Inter-departmental Commission on Drug Addiction in 1958 under the chairmanship of Sir Russell Brain. Three years later, the resulting Brain Report decided there was no need for any real worry or change. The main problem, it reported, lay in a small number of bohemianly inclined doctors who were over-prescribing to addicts, who then passed on their surplus to others: a case was cited of one doctor who prescribed 6 kilograms of heroin in one year. Another case concerned Lady Isabella Frankau who prescribed substantial quantities of drugs – one sixth of the national total of prescribed heroin in one year – on the genuine assumption she was undermining the black market she abhorred. In fact, she was supplying it, Brain informing the Home Office, ‘Your problem, gentlemen, can be summed up in two words – Lady Frankau.’

  Until the escalation in addiction, the British way of handling the problem was adequate but when addiction soared it was first swamped then collapsed, unable to handle the new drug subculture and its devotees. The government feared British cities would become like American ones and a second Brain Report was commissioned and published in 1965. This took a different view, suggesting tight restrictions on doctors and their prescribing, the establishment of addiction clinics and more competent search methods by customs officers to halt smuggling: yet the report held to the policy that addiction was a medical problem. The report created the foundation for the new Dangerous Drugs Act of 1967 and the setting up of drug treatment centres, the doctors of which were the only ones permitted to prescribe to addicts.