The Museum informing period productions

The Museum of Drugs has a growing reputation amongst academic circles and the media. As part of our mission we provide expert support to universities, colleges and television and film production companies, ensuring that their work is suitably informed. Recently the Museum has acted as a learned resource for a new period drama involving a character in the early 20th Century who was a consumer of opium. In contacting us, the production company affiliated to Tiger Aspect were keen to maintain their integrity through accurate representation of this widely available substance of the time. We were able to support their work with a balanced report, which we have included below for the benefit of our readership. The production company were able to make a small donation to the Museum which has gone straight to furthering our collection and research.

'Opium production, including poppy cultivation, and usage was widespread in England prior to the 20th Century, with areas such as the Fenlands being well known through its association. Britain had gone to war with China on two occasions in the 19th Century in order to enforce trade. The Opium Wars as they became known were a result of Chinese reluctance to trade with Britain, who seized upon the idea of selling Indian opium to China as a way of ensuring that once addicted they would be willing to trade openly. When the Chinese became alarmed at the rising numbers of the population who were becoming addicted they retaliated resulting in Britain declaring war.

It was in response to the emerging temperance movements of the late 19th Century that opium production and use started to become a matter of concern, arguably as a result of its impact on productivity in an increasingly industrialised world. Early legislation controlling the supply and use of opium were enshrined in the Pharmacy Act 1868. This included preparations such as raw opium, laudanum and other popular tinctures. As a result it was only permissible to purchase such drugs over the counter, although undoubtedly there prospered a black market.

Ironically, given the earlier wars, calls for temperance linked the use of opium in Britain with the influx of Chinese immigrants to her ports. Stories of opium dens started to appear in publications such as Harpers Weekly, where they characterised the Chinese as a cold and distant race, lascivious in their intentions towards respectable British society. Such stories were not unknown in more credible literature such as Dickens’s Edwin Drood or Doyle’s Sherlock Homes, the latter would often drift off to a favourite opium den in search of release from the torment of his genius, and to while his time with London’s criminal underbelly in search of clues.

The dawn of the 20th Century saw increasing intolerance towards the use of opium. Paradoxically it’s derivative, morphine, was widely used as a major painkiller in on the battlefields of northern France where Europe’s sons were witnessing slaughter on an unprecedented scale.

This era in which you are characterising your story is one of the most fascinating of all episodes in the history of drug use. High profile cases such as the death of Billie Carleton 1918, a West End actress who was widely reported to use both opium and cocaine, and Freda Kempton 1922, a dance instructress, flapper girl and heavy cocaine user, led to widespread moral panic in the media. The real concern was more about the fact that they were both white women, comparatively emancipated for the time, living on independent financial means, mixing with men of other race and living outside of the grasp of a paternalistic Edwardian society. Their deaths came to typify what would happen if Edwardian society failed to gain control and put women back by the hearth instead of employed in the industries whose traditional workforce lay buried in shell craters along the trench lines of the Somme and Arras.

Depending on the gender of your character, this cultural backdrop would provide an intriguing storyline. The issue of race is all-important, as many of the Empire’s subjects returned from fighting in the First World War to live in the motherland. Britain’s decimated population and the influx of migrant workers inevitably led to inter race relations. Society failed to see the benefits of such multiculturalism and focused instead on the dangers of drugs and their use, by Chinese men in particular, to ensnare white ‘vulnerable’ women.

The responsibility in characterising an opium user for television is to not perpetuate the moral panic, whilst acknowledging that drug use was very prevalent then and was indeed a feature of those who either sought to forget the hardships of war, or else seized on their use as part of the frivolity of the emerging jazz age.

Billie Carleton accessed her supply of opium through her friends and acquaintances, two of which were white British and another who happened to be of Egyptian nationality. At the inquest into her death the court heard how these acquaintances had accessed opium through a Chinese couple that lived in Bristol. Ever since the supply of opium to the Chinese in the 19th Century it had been a popular drug of choice and had found it’s way back to Britain via the docks of London, Bristol and Liverpool.

Undoubtedly Billie and her friends would have purchased opium already prepared for smoking. Billie would have attended parties at the homes of friends and smoked opium there, rather than going to the opium dens of Limehouse that have been so characterised in fiction.

If you wanted your character to frequent opium dens, these would have varied from a simple mattress on a floor in a backroom with someone on hand to keep the candles lit and the opium ready for smoking, to the more luxurious Parisian style with cushions and Chinese drapes. The price varied accordingly as did the clientele.

During the early part of the 20th Century opium derivatives had already been synthesised to create heroin and this was widely used with hypodermics. It would be reasonable for your character to have used opiate drugs in this way.

Notwithstanding, if you wish to go down the route of opium smoking, then it is likely that they would have had access to all the accoutrements that you describe your art department producing. Opium pipes of the Chinese style, long stem with bowl protruding at right angles two thirds of the way along, would have been imported by Chinese migrant workers. Many of these pipes were being destroyed en-masse by the Chinese authorities as opium use carried penalties of death in China. These would have come into the hands of Western smokers and collectors, this was the period of Art Nouveau/ Art Deco and Eastern influences were popular.

Having acquired a pipe and accoutrements, the user would have reclined to smoke a pea sized amount of the substance applied with a long pin called a ‘yen-hock’. The application involves holding the metal bowl of the pipe over the candle until very hot. The pea-sized amount of opium would be rolled and heated above the flame and then inserted into the hole in the bowl where it would vaporise. The reclined user would then inhale deeply several times as the opium is used up and they drift in and out of consciousness. In the modern day parlance of the heroin user this would be described as ‘gouching out’.

In terms of smoke, because the opium is actually vaporised it wouldn't have produced vast billowy clouds of smoke as often depicted, rather some wispy vapour trails. The production process of making the opium would have more likely happened at source, probably India, where Malwa and Patna opium had been cultivated by the British in the 19th Century prior to export to China. Turkish opium was also highly prized for its quality.

In the same way as cocaine is produced in Columbia and Mexico before export to western markets it would have been unlikely for British consumers of opium in the period 1900 – 1920 to have accessed the drug in it’s raw state, requiring production. They would have purchased it ready to use.

The quantity used by your character would depend on how compulsive a user they were as opposed to recreational use. They may have been someone who binged when the opportunity arose and were then able to stay away from it for days or weeks whilst they returned to normal duties. Some people would have used opium throughout a weekend, at night after they came back from the burgeoning clubs of the west end in order to relax. Billie Carleton was certainly a poly-drug user experienced in the use of opium and cocaine as well as the Veronal prescribed by her doctor. She would have been conversant with the effects of cocaine as a stimulant and opium as a depressant of the central nervous system and would have used both according to environment and setting. Cocaine was a club drug, used for partying, staying up all night and dancing to the ‘wild jungle rhythms’ associated with jazz music by the media. Opium would have provided the after party come down, to help ease the jitteriness of excessive cocaine consumption. You may wish to reflect this in your characterisation as it draws an interesting parallel with modern day drug consumption.

I hope this is of help to your work, however please do not hesitate to contact me should you wish to clarify anything further. The context is always important so I have tried to cover some of the essential background to the use of opium'.