Opium and the British

Abstract

In 1753, George Young wrote in the preface to his Treatise on Opium that, ‘opium has already got into the hands of every pretender to practice, and is prescribed every day, not only by the many charitable and well-meaning ladies, but by the too officious and ignorant nurses’, and added that he found opium to be a ‘slow poison’.¹ None the less until the mid-nineteenth century, opium and an array of various opium containing preparations could be bought, sold and consumed, without concern. Opium, which was freely imported into Britain, was also a lucrative trade for the wholesale druggists who saw the import duty payable on it drop from four shillings a pound weight in 1828 to one shilling a pound weight in 1836, and finally abolished in 1860.² Commensurately, levels of imported opium rose from 17 000lb in 1827, equal to 600mg per head, per year, to 35 000lb in 1833; and during the 1850s reached upwards of 55 000lb a year. By 1859, consumption had risen to 61 0001b per year, equivalent to an individual daily dose of 1410mg.³