What is opium? (1: The haunts behind a name)
Groundwork, positioning, intentions
Therefore I think myself oblig’d to detect the Errors of these People, and let the Publick know […] that such Authors only write from the Relations of other Men.
A Complete History of Drugs, Pierre Pomet
Turkish opium-eaters, it seems, are absurd enough to sit, like so many equestrian statues, on logs of wood as stupid as themselves.
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Thomas de Quincey
What is opium?
The haunts behind a name
(Unpublished) The eve of new bewitchments
(Unpublished) The trick-wine
(Unpublished) The medico-botanical commodity
(Unpublished) The levers of control
(Unpublished) The Romantic dreamscape
(Unpublished) The forms of concern
(Unpublished) The self-knowing infestation
(Unpublished) Floral arrangements
Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962) bore two other titles: Souls for Sale and Evils of Chinatown. The movie itself: unspectacular. a bog-standard moral exploitation film that is unremarkable at least to my own film-amateur eyes. But the trailer is extraordinary for all the things it very well might have realized about itself. For one, it wears a sort of Western fascination with the Oriental on its sleeve; it opens with a gong sound and the scratchy takeout text—the text reads “a dream world of exquisite beauty flowering from intolerable terror!”, and as tropes fold over on themselves repeatedly, the viewer, manifesting the sober gaze, sees amidst the sea of intolerable moments (to be handwaved away as mere truths of the time, a long-forgotten reality of a period from which we’ve since progressed) the central truth of the dreamy opiate temptation and the looming degeneration.
Each of the film’s three titles give something to consider. Confessions of an Opium Eater, of course, recalls Thomas de Quincey’s classic confessional of the same name. Souls for Sale gives a dual reading, one of the soul which has given into temptation and permitted opium to take hold it, the other of the body acting as its vessel which is given to the sex market. Evils of Chinatown calls for many “evils” in a non-specific Chinatown—there are many in America, but the implication that all of them, anywhere the “Chinaman” might dwell, so too lurk there the evils.
We might compare two other pieces of media which are evoked through the tropes and title: de Quincey’s aforementioned text (1821) and Requiem for a Dream (2000). de Quincey’s text is often considered to be the one which “brought opium-eating to the West”, so to speak—in its vivid Orient-themed descriptions combined with its church pew confessional nature, the text captivates the wayward soul lusting for exoticism and an escape from urbane normality. Requiem for a Dream can be viewed as a trope terminal—a story of addiction, loss, catastrophe, and growth, it involves (among other elements, but of most importance to us) a young couple in the throes of heroin addiction who morally degenerate until they have a “come to Jesus” moment in the midst of tragedy. The climax of the film is so sensational that it in a sense recalls the very same moral panic dimension of the earlier exploitation film, involving a gangrenous arm (hence the abject mutilated body) from heroin use, a brawl over a heroin shipment, catatonia, and group sex.
Between de Quincey’s text and the film which would later take on its name, there are a few elements in common. For one, there’s a clear Orientalism at play—the “evils of Chinatown” element; in de Quincey’s text, the character’s suspension into immorality and intemperance is both enabled and provided by the images of the Orient. The visage of an unreal Orient acts as a ghost haunting the text giving form to the intoxicate experiences; on the other hand, in the film, these have taken on a bodily form—the realities of the moral degeneration of addiction are on display. At the same time, where Quincey had to promise a certain interiority, a discursive stronghold has permitted the interiority to be simply implied by the context and the visage of the intoxicate subject.
At a certain point in de Quincey’s text, he refers to a night at the opera, and ponders “whether any Turk, of all that ever entered the Paradise of Opium-eaters, can have had half the pleasure I had. But, indeed, I honour the barbarians too much by supposing them capable of any pleasures approaching to the intellectual ones o f an Englishman.”1 In Confessions (1962), the truth of this statement is affirmed: the possibilities of an Oriental intoxication without the foolish Oriental are latent behind the images of Oriental women who have succumbed to the most grave depravities in the Western oculus; at the same time, the statement is lambasted: it is the very accessibility of the implied core opium experience which provides the so-called “power” to threaten all with the spectre of moral and racial degeneration. The Western experience of intoxication with all its mortal bliss is foreclosed to the “stupid” Oriental, but it must be the ever-present appearance of the Oriental which opened up the very space of possibility for this intoxication.
By Confessions (1962) and Requiem, a figure had appeared which was notably absent in Quincey’s text: the woman whose soul is for sale. This image lines up uneasily with old clinical descriptions of hysterical morphinomaniacs: the woman who would give anything for more of the drug which completes them. Both the opium pipe and the syringe become all the more phallic as they represent the symbolic wholeness of the woman with an unstable ego. Moreover, the actual phallus is mercurial; cascading through deferences to various men in the film, the stable symbolic phallus is precisely that of the apparatus used to consume the drug, whether pipe or syringe. Falling into the sex trade to sustain their habit, or lured into the habit by way of the sex trade as means of keeping them dependent, both films represent a problem which is both real—it is not uncommon for victims of human trafficking to use, nor for elements of their use to be made dependent on their traffickers—and unreal in the sense of fulfilling a sort of fantasy of the sober gaze, one on which it depends: that “sobriety” as a normative goal is the default for a reason, that a taste of the Oriental bliss of the opiate is all it would take to unravel their present suspension between a whole and an incomplete human being, a soul self-possessed versus a soul for sale. Sobriety as a norm is neither innocent nor bloodless but in fact depends on the perpetual violence against the perceived intoxicate for its sustenance.
Despite the lack of an explicit “Evils of Chinatown” element, Requiem for a Dream nevertheless contains it. The opiate had already been traced long before by the idea not just of any dream—not, to be sure, the dreams of the rational Apollonian—but the specifically exotic and captivating dream, the hallmark of an Orientalist influence that had once been much more explicit. Opiated subjectivity had long since been constructed as something that is markedly Orientalist—the escape from unreason, the captivation of the impulsive hysteric, the themes of a degenerating temptation, all thrive without mention as we see our heroine gradually “shed her morality” in a way that the viewer will immediately recognize. The film, operating within a matrix of norms and social control, must confess to the truth of the very themes it intends to confront. Her soul, too, is for sale.
The hysterical addict reprises herself relentlessly—the most recent cultural sensation to feature the trope is Euphoria—but because the origins are so lost, each one presents itself flawlessly as a confessional story or hardship tale. Each one can only do so with complete innocence, because it is entirely unaware of its guilt.
In the late 18th century, John Hector St. John published a book entitled Letters from an American Farmer, featuring the following passage:2
A singular custom prevails here among the women, at which I was greatly surprized; and am really at a loss how to account for the original cause that has introduced in this primitive society so remarkable a fashion, or rather so extraordinary a want. They have adopted these many years, the Asiatic custom of taking a dose of opium every morning; and so deeply rooted is it, that they would be at a loss how to live without this indulgence; they would rather be deprived of any necessary than forego their favorite luxury. This is much more prevailing among the women than the men, few of the latter having caught the contagion; though the sheriff, whom I may call the first person in the island, who is an eminent physician beside, and whom I had the pleasure of being well acquainted with, has for many years submitted to this custom. He takes three grains of it every day after breakfast, without the effects of which, he often told me, he was not able to transact any business.
It is hard to conceive how a people always happy and healthy, in consequence of the exercise and labour they undergo, never oppressed with the vapours of idleness, yet should want the factitious effects of opium to preserve that cheerfulness to which their temperance, their climate, their happy situation so justly entitle them.
A traveler, several years later writing of travels in 1816 and 1817, responded to his claims saying it was well-known that the “unwholesome” practice was widespread in America.3 By the 1830s, this ‘Asiatic’ custom had gained the potential to be an explanatory factor for the apparent gaunt homeliness of American women:4
It is seldom that a stranger can enter into conversation with the ladies, though he meets them at meals, for they range themselves all on one side at the head of the table, and seldom remain longer than ten minutes. They generally eat a great deal of sweetmeats, which I have little doubt affect their complexions, as they weaken the stomach, and by thus debilitating the system, impart the pale hue generally observed in the faces of the American ladies. I have been told that they are much addicted to eating opium, and drinking laudanum; and this, if true, would, of itself, account for their pallid looks.
The perspectives of these women, having already been sacrificed, will find yet another life as an example: there are two vicious forms of voicelessness in the archival canon which I’d like to mention, ones which thread together—the first being extravagance under subjection, the second being mundanity. Extravagance—extraordinariness, spectacularity—is a normative function of the gaze which orders behavior relative to the ordinary; that is, extravagance requires the (tenuous) preconception of an interior identity walled off from a set of predefined behaviors which themselves must be both identified and othered. For something to be a spectacle, it in a sense has to be discursively preordained as a spectacle; otherwise it is either normative (and therefore mundane) or discursively incomprehensible. In a setting where, as yet another traveller notes about Philadelphia, he “stood in one spot, and counted eleven chemists' ‘stores’ in sight at once, the furthest certainly not a quarter of a mile off[;] the Americans, young and old, certainly do swallow medicine in amazing quantities”,5 there must be some shadow lurking which could render the women’s relationship to opium in particular worthy of note. For the literate, this would have been clear: the Oriental body and its sinful intemperance with regard to opium had been already been a relationship in the Western discourse during the 18th century, and by the end of the 18th century it had been endlessly affirmed by travel literature and colonial reports on the habits, behaviors, and temperaments of the Savage and the Oriental.
There’s something else worthy of note in the peculiar language of our humble farmer: the idea that the women would rather do anything than go without their luxury almost implies attempts to render them apart from it. At the same time, we cannot find in his language a sense of compulsion or devotion, merely a strong desire aligned with will; this is nothing minor, and in fact the idea of “addiction” as a prediscursive and natural tendency which involves a will that has been bound by an overwhelming and compulsive desire depends on realizations as such. Although to modern eyes this behavior may look like that of an addict, it is in fact only the behavior of someone who both desires and wills very strongly. The women are not prisoners of desire but willfully intemperate; their conception of themselves likely would have matched something similar, but those voices have been lost to time and the brutal preoccupations of the archive. Nor is the sheriff speaking of a “lack” when he hasn’t had opium, but only a willful desire for its effects. The two are very different in nature.
Moreover, with the first text, the women had been predisposed in a manner which the men hadn’t. One needn’t look much further than the chain between the Turkish infidel and the marital haunt of possible infidelity to understand the precarious position of the opiated woman, particularly at a time where, as we will discuss, the trauma of the Crusades lived indefinitely in the mind of the Western subject. Women did not achieve their discursive baggage of cunning, cleverness, and deception out of nowhere; the same fertile grounds which would eventually produce the trope of the femme fatale had been long in place with the ever-present fear of the promiscuous woman concealing her true nature, or worse, wearing it in the open as a plague-like infestation (another living trauma for the 18th century Western subject) for others to catch—language used by our author himself.
If the first two texts are read as a sort of propertarian anxiety embodied by a suspicion of the “unwholesome” Orient, the third can equally be read as a confirmation of that anxiety: the opium-eating women, disposed by virtue of being women to a certain temptation toward viciousness, had fallen into a sort of Asian degeneration which was mirrored in the hollowness of their bodies. Yet at first, it did not seem that opium-eating had been so loaded with potential meanings and outcomes; in spite of the latent anxieties, there was little comment on the women aside from the nature of the habit itself and their predilection for it.
It should be noted, too, that the direct attribution of this appearance to opium, rather than any sort of social or environmental factors, is not an easy one to make: one would already had to have conceived that opium in particular is capable of producing that result. In fact, one reason that there is such a dearth of mentions of this activity during the period despite, taking the accounts at their word, a widespread and unrepentant consumption of medicine is that it had not yet become fully saturated with the image of the Orient and, by way of such saturation, spectacular.
And moreover, one should ask: why is it that the bodies of the women were not commented on in the first two texts, but they were in the third? Or more accurately, why are they differentiated in the third? Surely the 18th century, with its affinity for measurement and analogy, might have seen fit to comment on the bodies—were it a discursive priority. Indeed, the relationship of intemperance to disease, vice, and degeneration had been long established for e.g., drinking. Yet the body begins to perform a different function between the 18th and 19th centuries, one which had in a sense opened the women up to such form of commentary. The birth of the concept of addiction and the bodily implantment of mental disorder on the eve of the 19th century opened up a conceptual space for a mechanical recomprehension of the place of such vicious degeneration, one which shows clearly on the body; it was no longer sufficient for chronic drunkenness, as an example, to descend into madness as a matter of fact for sin and vice, but it must be placed within an order of rational causality that might observe and make sense of it. In that sense, it might be a simple reordering that had placed it within the realm of commentary—that is, before it was a given that vice had an impact on the body; with the simultaneous religious zeal of the early 19th century alongside the growing place of a pseudo-secular medical framework, however, this became the object of reportage, analysis, and numericization. It is by way of this that in the first text the bodies are described without any sort of differentiation from the general population, healthy and capable of labor, but by the third text they had become differentiated.
It’s certainly not impossible to read the third text as a sort of lay diagnosis: the bodies are hollow and unattractive as a result of an opiate cause. At the same time, this is also clearly not the product of a raw medical intrigue. Even provided the nosological reading, we must recall that part of the essential mechanisms of the 18th century politics of health was what Foucault called “nosopolitics”—the augmentation and development of the diagnosis as a tool for enacting the administration of bodies in certain ways, and one which itself was bound up within a politics and a discourse of bodies. It is impossible to sever one discourse of the body from another, as impossible as to sever the image of the rotting domestic opium-eating woman from the image of the rotting foreign opium-eating pauper.
What would even be a raw medical intrigue? One finds the overwhelming participation of physicians of the latter 19th century in Temperance causes, and those causes were no doubt fueled not by the innocent analysis of the body and a sterile chain of causation alone. The roots of the modern Temperance movement reach back to 17th and 18th century sermons by Protestant pastors on the sins and degenerations of intemperance. For instance, one can see a clear line of descent between the sermons of Increase Mather in the 1670s—the diseases and ramp of bodily and spiritual degeneration for the chronic drunkard—and the development of disease and mental/physical disorder in cases of chronic drunkenness in Benjamin Rush’s first text on the topic in the 1790s. Texts like Rush’s would be used to teach new generations of physicians, who then would build on that framework. There is no moment of spontaneous benefice in the medical corpus where a new generation of physicians arises with a detached and wholly empirical intrigue—in fact, those empirical observations, those questions of what ought to be asked and how it ought to be approached, are already bound up in an enclosing discourse.
By the end of the 19th century there would be a full occupation of the analysis of the female morphinomaniac and opiomaniac by the concerns of menstruation, fertility, barrenness—there indeed would be a male counterpart in the notion of sterility. And neither did such concerns with population and reproductive health emerge sight unseen from the ether in the second half of the nineteenth century, but had already been put in place, somehow, by the population discourses and mechanics of the 18th and early 19th century. One finds in the third text not an obvious development of a secularizing medical viewpoint but the presence of the very sort of lay speech which might be used as evidence for such a medical viewpoint—the simulacrum of the degenerated woman which played on and manifested from the very fears of the degenerated woman, a hologram projected in front of the reader as though it were a zoo exhibit.
In short: is it merely that at this moment in the 1830s, a latent patriarchal reprimanding of the female body and imposition of expectations just happened to be actualized, perhaps by a “bad apple”? Or is it that intoxication, and chronic intoxication, emerged as a new apparatus for the gaze to perpetuate and enact patriarchy in a new manner, reminding of the ever-present fears that come along with that specific form of patriarchal domination—namely, an overturning of the social order, miscegenation, infidelity (in all senses)? Is it that opium’s intoxication was latent and merely actualized in its horror here to realize a horrifying female body, or is it that the potential of intoxication as a discursive and normative judgment, growing out of intemperance, took on a specific power and became a property of opium per se, which then enabled the horrification of the female body in this specific manner? Is it that a sterile and empirical view of opium intoxication had been held in place and dispassionately applied over the body of both the woman and the poor Oriental, or is the very concept of dispassion a guise for more insiduous forms of domination, and the dispassionate dichotomy of sobriety (or abstinent temperance) and intoxication (or intemperance) in fact a very impassioned dichotomy which has the capacity to morph and slip according to the extant goals of hegemonic social orders?
If we set our gaze back on the women being spoken of, we might ask when they were given to speak. We might even ask when they were given to sight (if it is uncouth to take our author’s word into question, but not the behaviors, appearances, and tendencies of the reported women, then surely that would betray some sort of underlying bias.) But beyond this, we might even ask if their speech might meet any sort of critical expectations—for their speech too would have been bound up in an Orientalist discourse.
What, indeed, are the perspectives of those nameless women or the metaphorical Orient being gestured toward? The accountants did not ask; the accounted, apparently lost and degenerate, received no council.
I’ve written before (Names and Pleasures) detailing an excerpt from a latter 19th century work critical of opium, hashish, and morphine consumption by Dr H.H. Kane, from which the above illustration is taken; it concerned a young hysteric who was forcibly committed to an institution to withdraw from morphine—it was said that the withdrawal reinitiated her period, and after intense menstrual bleeding and attempts to remove subdermal needles from her skin, she succumbed to death, at which point hundreds more needles were extracted from her body. It should be noted that the embedding of needles into the skin was, at the time, a form of self-harm that was adequately documented; the specific overloading of the practice here which could symbolically tether and attribute it to morphinomania and hysteria, however, was a leap that must have been enabled by a certain sort of clinical gaze which had at point of first contact already been predisposed by a patriarchal and Orientalist structure.
At any rate, I recall this to mention that the relationship between femininity and drug prohibition has long been of interest to me. Since then, I’ve come to put a much greater focus on the conditions of alterity and subalterity, and how they intersect with the development of what we might call the modern Drug apparatus, eminent and pervasive in the structural logic of modern medicine, penal policy, and recreation. In essence: once one considers colonialism, global supply chains, the psycho-medical complexes of ableism, Orientalism, military movements, and geopolitics—what then?
In all of the above examples, one can see shades of many of those different factors poke through. How, by/under what circumstances, and at what point the different implications changed—and what possibilities opened up as a result: that is the purpose of this series. Examining a few texts in detail and charting the course of different lineages of the modern drug through the 18th and 19th centuries in particular, we will try to understand how this powerful concept—which would seem terribly anachronistic in any other place and time—rings so convincingly as immortal truth to our own ears.
My reasoning for that time period is simple: although the overall concept of the Drug as we know it today became far more comprehensive, legally ingrained, and institutionally enforced during the 20th century, the possibility of such metastasis had already been opened up by:
The developments within physick in the 18th century and the politics of health in the 18th and 19th centuries, which enabled a particular understanding of the way the human body interacts with substances and indeed involved a philosophical victory in the name of discrete (rather than continuous) substance and causality.
The development of a general concept of intoxication which could encompass many different practices and objects. This was performed during the 18th and 19th centuries. One must recall that even the broader “alcohol” we refer to today had once been very separate categories of drink with perceived differences in effects and outcomes; more precisely, the conceptual space of “liquors” was much broader and the term could invoke water and milk as well.
The development of disciplinary levers capable of instrumentalizing said general “intoxication” to carry out the goals of population control, discipline of the citizenry, control over the conduct of colonial populations, psychiatrization, and so on.
These, among others we’ll explore. “What is opium?” will be quite long when all is said and done—I’m still uncertain exactly how it will be structured in the end. However, the other things which I’d like to write depend on ideas which I will articulate here: bewitchment and its domestication, intoxication as a disciplinary judgment, causal violence, intoxicate (and opiated, amphetaminated, etc.) subjectivity, the sober gaze, &c.
The following few entries will pertain to an early 18th century medical text which can give insight as to how the first and second occurred, what shifts were happening, and what possibilities would open up as a result. After that, we will examine how things like colonial policy benefited from, contributed to, and reinforced this concept.
The end goal is not to produce a stale endorsement of opium (or any other “drug”, for that matter), but to do something relatively novel: a sustained criticism of the very category of the “drug” and the special status given to modern medical, scientific, and psychiatric knowledge as pristine, inherently correct, well-intentioned and humble—to demonstrate that the three are themselves bound up in a language that is bloody, brutal, and infinitely penal, but that if one tries, it is very possible to think of so-called “drugs” and “intoxication” in a very different manner. As such, one should also not look to “What is opium?” if they wish to find a moment-by-moment history of opiates in America; for that, I would recommend one of my personal favorites Milk of Paradise by Lucy Inglis, as well as the perennial Dark Paradise by David T. Courtwright and In Pursuit of Oblivion by Richard Davenport-Hines. My focus is more on moments within history that can help us to trace out larger transformations in the conception of opium and the opiated self and to demonstrate, generally, what movements are at play in inventing an intoxicant.
The argument to be made here—that intoxication, or “ecstasy”, is as much a socially contingent phenomena as it is anything real and interior, if not much moreso—likely seems improbable. However, it is made not without precedent or incentive. The precedent can be found in texts like Derrida’s “Rhetoric of Drugs” interview or in Ziegler’s wonderful Inventing the Addict (where she truly has written most of what I will have to write, more ably than I could write it). The incentive is that as things stand the discourse around ‘intoxication’ seems to be only capable of producing a small set of cyclical viewpoints—one need only see the humanistic defenses of opium eaters in the 18th and 19th century (and we will) to understand that we have in fact “progressed” very little with this discourse. If producing a meaningfully different statement involves making a very difficult argument, then so be it.
When one is asked “what is opium?”, how does one respond? It depends on the haunts behind the name. Those haunts embed themselves into and script over the body of the observed which is, prior to witness, paraphrasing Eve Sedgwick, simply a person and a behavior.
de Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1898: Heath’s English Classics). Originally published 1821. p. 77
St. John de Crevecoeur, J. Hector. Letters from an American Farmer (1782). p. 136
Hall, Francis. Travels in Canada, and the United States, in 1816 and 1817 (1818). p. 7
Logan, James. Notes of a journey through Canada, the United States of America, and the West Indies (1838). pp. 196-197
Bell, Andrew. Men and Things in America (1838). pp. 200-201