Opium by Martin Booth Page A

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.

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    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