In Victorian literature, the drug of choice was opium, imbibed through water pipes. Its use was a signal that something had gone very wrong in a person’s life.
They would take a carriage to the bad part of town and enter an opium den. There they would stay for days at a time, in a dark haze, lounging on Turkish pillows in a foggy mental state, neglecting work and family.
For all its cultural association with down-and-out aristocrats, opium was considered a wonder drug by physicians. It was a pain reliever, a stress reducer, a highly valued therapy for a variety of ailments.
Opium, however, was the first target in the modern war on drugs, inspiring restrictions on Chinese immigration here and the eventual banning of the commercial trade both in the U.S. and Britain.
It didn’t take long for other derivatives of the poppy to displace opium. Heroin became the drug of choice, and synthetics were already popular by the 1940s. And so it has been for the whole of the war on drugs: Ban one drug and something worse comes along, each new iteration more terrifying than the last.
Instead of opium, today we deal with ever more dangerous drugs and drug mixtures, widely available on every party circuit.
