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"Mania Americana": Narcotic Addiction and Modernity in the United States, 1870–1920
Timothy A. Hickman
The ancients paid sacred homage to Morpheus, god of sleep and dreams; and now, in the midst of an age of intelligence and advancement, we find a vast army of men and women bowing at the shrine of the arch-fiend Morphia, named after the classic deity of old.
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| —Leslie E. Keeley, M.D., 1897 |
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| Despite its long association with Asian cultures, habitual narcotic use gained little public attention in the West before the publication of Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in 1822. De Quincey's text was popular on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and its conclusions about the "pains" involved in breaking off opium use were echoed by frequent reports from nineteenth-century physicians whose otherwise cured patients were sometimes unable to stop taking their narcotic medications. Nonetheless, few antebellum Americans felt themselves or their society to be particularly threatened by narcotics. The vast publicity created by the various temperance movements helped generate public anxiety over the widespread social consequences of heavy drinking, but fear of narcotic drugs did not particularly grip the public imagination. This relative obscurity would not outlast the century.1 |
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Soon after the Civil War, several factors combined to force the drug habit out from the shadows and to recast it as a pressing social problem. First, the medical knowledge and use of narcotics had grown throughout the nineteenth century, especially after the hypodermic syringe came into broad use during the 1860s and 1870s. Though the popular belief that Civil War battlefield medicine was the chief cause of subsequent narcotic use has been disproved, a general increase in the prescription of narcotics during the Civil War era created a taste for them. The actual number of narcotic addicts during this period is notoriously difficult to establish, but the most reliable estimate is that the rate of addiction probably peaked in the mid-1890s at about 4.59 per thousand and then began to decline. Various reformers and entrepreneurs exaggerated the figures and also their trend, convincing much of the public that one million or more addicts were on the loose during the 1910s—about 10.9 per thousand—and that their numbers were increasing. In any case, by the 1870s both medical and popular writers had begun to draw attention to what they characterized as a spiraling national drug problem. The changing composition of the drug-using population further helped focus negative attention on the practice, as the constituency for drug use slowly shifted from upper- and middle-class white women, whose habits started on the prescription of their doctors, to lower-class urban men on the fringes of the underworld. The historian David T. Courtwright has argued that this demographic shift aided the task of painting narcotic use as a threatening and deviant practice.2 |
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Politics too favored the emergence of the narcotic habit as a public threat. David F. Musto's The American Disease shows that drug policy has never been a transparently scientific solution to an unambiguously medical problem. The book's early chapters examine the influence of a group of diplomats, entrepreneurs, and reformers on the passage of the Harrison Narcotic Act, which in 1914 limited access to licensed wholesalers, physicians, and patients in possession of a valid prescription. Yet, as Courtwright pointed out, demographics and politics are not by themselves sufficient to explain the genesis of American attitudes toward the habitual use of narcotics.3 |
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