by Lucy Inglis
In 1858, state legislature in California, today regarded as one of the most liberal states in America, made it illegal for anyone of Chinese or Mongolian appearance to enter the state, but it was thrown out of the Supreme Court. After the Civil War, the economy went into decline and the Chinese were even more reviled. Dennis Kearney, the racist labour leader who gave long, ranting speeches against the Chinese, and his labour organization the Workingman’s Party of California, were responsible for stirring up huge anti-Chinese sentiment, and finally the state tried exclusion again in 1878, but President Rutherford B. Hayes refused. So California passed an Act that meant the state could let in who it wanted, and forced the Chinese Exclusion Act through in 1882. The Act was repealed in 1943, but it took until 2014 for California to call upon Congress to apologize for passing it in the first place.
‘Trixie!’*: Deadwood, South Dakota
Opiates were not just a fixture of the West and East coasts of America in the late nineteenth century. They also moved inland with the workers who travelled along the railroads and into the mining towns, and it was not only the Chinese who controlled the trade in it, or consumed it. In the winter of 1875, in a ravine between two rocky outcrops over two and a half miles long and initially full of dead trees, the mining town of Deadwood, South Dakota, was established at the end of the Gold Rush, ‘at the centre of the last and richest gold field on the globe’.42 The year before, Colonel George Armstrong Custer had struck gold in South Dakota, and there were still plenty of people who wanted to try their hand at mining. In early 1876, Charlie Utter led a wagon train to the new settlement, carrying notorious gambler Madame Mustache, as well as others determined to live a new life in what was essentially a large camp.
Deadwood had a small Chinese community from the start, which in 1880 numbered 116 out of around 5,000 miners, business and townspeople, according to the census, although archaeological evidence points to a far bigger community of around 400.43 They established a Chinatown at the lower end of Main Street, creating the necessary infrastructure to house a large group of men aged sixteen to eighty-six, including a Joss House, which served as a temple and meeting place. Estelline Bennett, a resident of Deadwood during its earliest time and well into its most established phase, and also the judge’s daughter, described it as ‘painted brown with little red embellishments pointed and peaked and squared itself in unexpected ways and places . . . The inside we were never permitted to see. A peculiar and intriguing odor of incense came to meet you a block away’.44
On 7 April 1877, the Gem Variety Theater, owned by Al Swearengen, opened its doors. Martha Jane Burke, best known as Calamity Jane, worked for him as a dancer and procuress, but she lived in Chinatown. Swearengen not only had the bar and brothel, he also ran the town’s opium trade. This strange reversal of roles was down to three things. Swearengen was a career pimp and drug dealer, and also had the monopoly on the supply chain through Charlie Utter and his brother Steve. Lastly, the nearest Chinese community and potential source of supply was 300 miles away in Wyoming.
Wing Tsue, a Chinese grocer of high standing in the camp, was also involved in the opium business and was fined for it at least once in the early years of the settlement, presumably to push him out of the trade. His main business rival in the Chinese community was another grocer known as Hi Kee, and the two rarely spoke and were suspected to be leaders of rival Triads.45 On 4 July, they held what was known as the firehorse race, where the employees of each man would drag a fire engine through the street by the hose to a finish line. Deadwood is conspicuous for the Chinese community joining in the American and Christian celebrations and vice versa, including Chinese New Year. The local doctor was invited to Chinese funerals and carried a spoon with him for the wake because he couldn’t use chopsticks. Wing Tsue’s grocery advertisements, which included the finest Chinese silk scarves, were embellished at the bottom: ‘Americans as well as Chinese are invited to call and inspect my goods.’46 Having learned English at the Congregational School, Wing Tsue (whose real name was Fee Lee Wong) once decorated a wedding cake with ‘God made the world but Wong made this cake’.47
In November 1883, three opium dens were operating in Deadwood, corroborated by archaeological evidence of pipes, bowls and paraphernalia found in the early 2000s on a four-year dig there. Also discovered were a selection of bottles, including American and Chinese patent medicines, and ‘beer, wine, champagne, whiskey, gin, brandy, soda and mineral water, and soda pop’.48 The cost of a pipe of opium in one of the dens was twenty cents, and for a dollar the customer could smoke as much as he liked until he fell into a slumber. Estelline Bennett said the judiciary, which included her father, were uninterested in Deadwood’s opium trade. ‘If a Chinaman wanted to smoke, who cared? They were rarely any trouble about anything else.’49
The only people who seemed to care about either the close communities or the opium consumption were the newspapers, who regularly sent reporters to Deadwood to try and tease out a story or an angle. The Black Hills Daily Times reported on 6 May 1878 ‘that thousands of dollars a week is taken from circulation here by the Chinese smoke houses. Every dollar which drops into their coffers is salted. Something should be done to root out those institutions. They not only gobble a large portion of our floating cash but demoralize and destroy a large portion of our citizens. Opium smoking is a greater evil than whiskey drinking.’
Owing to this sort of pressure, the Territory of Dakota finally passed a law in 1878 to make it illegal to own a den or handle opium. It did not make much difference. What did stir public feeling, though, were the reports of suicide attempts by Deadwood’s prostitutes. Of the three connected with Al Swearengen reported in the local press, Hattie Lewis (his mistress), Emma Worth and Eva Robinson had all tried to take their lives with opiates.
Ultimately, however, the press failed to have much effect on Deadwood, despite nipping persistently at its heels. The close alliances between communities of American and Chinese are doubtless not unique to Deadwood, though it is recorded there in a uniquely detailed fashion because of the amount of famous characters of the Old West who passed through – or didn’t, in the case of Wild Bill Hickok, who was murdered there in 1876, just as the town got on its feet. Charlie Utter, Seth Bullock, Al Swearengen and Calamity Jane were all involved with the Chinese community on Lower Main Street, where the Chinese loved the white American bread of the baker there, Bob Howe, so he baked to the Chinese dinner hour.50 This level of integration was a far cry from the anti-Chinese sentiments of coastal America, where drugs, and therefore the Chinese, were rapidly being demonized. Life at the edge of civilization had brought disparate groups of people together in a way that, for better or worse, absorbed the opium trade as an accepted fact of life.
Al Swearengen was found dead in Denver on 15 November 1904, of a blow to the head with a blunt instrument.
From the Gold Rush to the Gold Cure
Deadwood, and many places like it, were completely without law up until the 1880s, but elsewhere, such as in Pennsylvania, New York, London and European cities, attempts to regulate the medical profession had begun in the middle of the century. In 1858, Britain passed the Medical Reform Act, attempting to ensure that doctors were licensed medical practitioners, and then in 1868 the Pharmacy Act meant that finally the two disciplines were separate. The Pharmacy Act was particularly significant as it limited the sale of certain drugs over the counter without a doctor’s prescription. There was an immediate and significant drop in the death rate caused by opium preparations, from 6.4 per million in 1868 to 4.5 per million in 1869. More significantly it meant that deaths amongst children under five dropped from 20.5 per million (1863–7) to 12.7 per million in 1871. Owing to the removal of opiates from most patent medicines, it continued to fall in the 1880s to around 7 per million.51
There were, however, a rising number of addicts. Leading members of the medical communities of Britain and America began to study groups of opiate addicts in particular, to find out the demo
graphic and, crucially, try to find out why people became addicted.
Dr Alonzo Calkins, a specialist in narcotics, collated 360 case studies of opiate addicts in 1871, and judged that many wealthy women who spent their days ‘idly lolling upon her velvety fauteil’ waiting for the hours to pass were most susceptible to fall prey to opiate addiction.52 ‘Uterine and ovarian complications cause more ladies to fall into the habit, than all other diseases combined,’ remarked another doctor.53 In American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences the neurologist George Miller Beard noted that, ‘The general laws are that the more nervous the organization, the greater risk the susceptibility to stimulants and narcotics . . . Woman is more nervous, has a finer organization than man, and is accordingly more susceptible to most of the stimulants.’54 Even worse, Gaillard Thomas, president of the American Gynecological Society, confided that ‘for the relief of pain, the treatment is all summed up in one word, and that is opium. The divine drug overshadows all other anodynes . . . You can easily educate her to become an opium-eater, and nothing short of this should be aimed at by the medical attendant.’55 There were even arguments for the education of women being the culprit, something self-proclaimed addiction expert Dr Leslie Keeley also agreed with.
As cases of escalating drug use presented themselves, and women who had been treated with laudanum for period pains ended up injecting morphine, these arguments seemed increasingly arrogant and dangerous.
The invention of the hypodermic had been so groundbreaking it had been a catalyst for the squabbling British medical community to pull itself into a coherent unit, and they were keen to see the Pharmacy Act passed, and control over morphine injections returned to the doctor. Thomas De Quincey, who reissued Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in 1856, also issued a challenge to the British medical community: that they knew nothing about the true experience of opium upon the individual, so therefore they were in no position to regulate such matters. Two doctors, James Russell and Francis Anstie, rebuked him, Anstie especially on the subject of self-injecting, but with regulation looming, most doctors did not want to be involved.
Research into the potentials and dangers of the hypodermic and morphine intensified over the next two decades as, particularly, wealthier patients presented with more related problems, despite the apparent new difficulties getting hold of morphine. Harry Hubbell Kane was an American doctor who conducted much research into both opiates and cannabis – the latter he tried personally and wrote up the experience in 1883 – and he attacked De Quincey as ‘hand[ing] down to succeeding generations a mass of ingenious lies’, and condemning them to bondage.56 Alonzo Calkins was another to attack De Quincey on the grounds that the doctor knows best.
Amongst the majority of the professional medical community, it was firmly believed that women in their thirties were the most likely to abuse opiates. Stay-at-home wives were especially vulnerable. Therefore, it was quite a shock to the reputation of the medical community on both sides of the Atlantic when, in 1883, prominent American physician J. B. Mattinson made the claim that the majority of United States doctors were morphine users, and that between 30 per cent and 40 per cent were addicts.57 A later study reinforced this, taking different countries around the world and gauging that, of all addicts, doctors comprised 40 per cent and their wives 10 per cent. The recently formed body of medical professionals, now in both Britain and America, looked like hypocrites in the new debates on addiction and therapies.
In the midst of this, Dr Leslie Keeley established himself in Dwight, Illinois, where he opened a sanitorium charging ‘inebriates’ $160 per day to take tonics including his ‘Gold Cure’. His injections contained a solution of strychnine and boric acid, with the alkaloid atropine. The Keeley Institutes were an enormous success.
* In the critically acclaimed HBO series Deadwood, which aired between 2004 and 2006, Al Swearengen is frequently heard to call for his trusted confidante, the prostitute Trixie. Trixie was depicted as one of the few women to escape Swearengen’s employ, finding a job and a partner, and is later revealed to have overcome an opium addiction.
PART THREE
Heroin
Chapter Seven
A NEW ADDICTION, PROHIBITION AND THE RISE OF THE GANGSTER
Narcomania and the Birth of Addiction Therapy
Just as morphinism truly took hold in America during the 1870s, the next chapter in the history of opiates began across the Atlantic, in a research laboratory near Paddington Station. The massive edifice of St Mary’s Hospital, operating since 1851, is one of London’s great Victorian monuments to public health and social improvement. It and the associated medical school, based on ‘Christian and genteel values’, were in a rough area known for prostitution, vagrancy and a high immigrant population. Initially they took in around forty students and taught basic sciences, medicine and surgery, as well as materia medica or the early study of pharmacology. It is often, rightly, lauded for being the place where researcher Alexander Fleming returned from holiday in 1928 and found penicillin infesting one of his neglected petri dishes, but in 1874 it was also the place where diacetylmorphine was first synthesized by Charles Romley Alder Wright (1844–94), whilst working under chemist Augustus Matthiessen (1831–70).
Matthiessen had started at St Mary’s in 1862, focussing on the alkaloid components of opium. He was joined by the young Alder Wright, a physicist and chemist working primarily on codeine and morphine. Matthiessen and Alder Wright had been charged with finding a form of painkiller that wasn’t as addictive as morphine.
Matthiessen had studied under Robert Bunsen in Heidelberg, and the Bunsen burner was part of the equipment at St Mary’s. His and Alder Wright’s experiments seem precarious, consisting as they did of sealing potent chemicals inside test tubes and then heating them with burners, but they produced a range of compounds that included apomorphine, which is now used to make dogs vomit when they eat something poisonous. Then, in 1870, Matthiessen killed himself owing to ‘nervous strain’ aged thirty-nine, after he was accused of indecently assaulting a young man, leaving his colleague Wright to continue alone. Alder Wright went on experimenting with alkaloids, particularly with a process known as acetylation. Acetylation is the chemical process of introducing an acetyl group of atoms into a compound, substituting them for an active hydrogen atom, and even the most basic of explanations about how this works open with the qualifying phrase ‘extremely complicated’. The physical process, though, is not so complicated, and as Matthiessen had discovered previously, acetylation made alkaloid compounds more potent.
As his main equipment consisted of test tubes and a Bunsen burner, a common misconception is that Alder Wright simply boiled morphine and ended up with heroin. Instead, Wright used acetylation to ‘cook’ diacetylmorphine from morphine base in 1874. The physical process of making diacetylmorphine from morphine base is not that complicated, although it requires precision, skill and some degree of patience. The process that Alder Wright used is also the process that has been used for cooking legal and illegal diacetylmorphine ever since: the only thing that varies is quantities of scale. The blocks of high-grade morphine base that could be freely ordered by a research laboratory were broken down and reduced to small chips, sometimes simply by hammering or grating them. The chips were then heated slowly to remove all moisture, then put into a steel vat and acetic anhydride added. This created a reaction that gave off a reeking gas, and when it had finished reacting, water was added to convert any remaining acetic anhydride to harmless acetic acid. Impurities found at this stage were removed with chloroform, and then sodium carbonate was used to neutralize the acetic acid. Then, as now, this is the second dangerous part of the process, when the mixture can ‘boil’ and explode. Litmus paper was used continuously to make sure all the acid was gone, and then the resulting precipitate was dried, ready for use.
Alder Wright handed this product over to the London doctor F. M. Pierce to be tested on a dog and a rabbit, along with codeine, as he and Matthiessen had
done before. Pierce failed to make comparative tests with standard morphine, so diacetylmorphine didn’t seem any more or less effective, and was thus discarded as yet another failure. Wright went back to work in his laboratory.
In the same year, 1874, the largely Quaker-led and catchily named Anglo-Oriental Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade set up its headquarters in King Street, Westminster, to be near both the India Office and the Houses of Parliament. Its intention was to lobby the government to stop selling opium to China, and to see legislation passed to that effect. Previously, it had been a well-organized but dispersed group of businessmen who believed the British government was responsible for the deliberate degradation of the Asian peoples through the opium trade, although they drew the line at abolishing the British Empire altogether, preferring instead to lobby for more missionaries to convert those Asian peoples. Their focus was almost exclusively on China, rather than India, where the opium habit was not perceived to be a problem in the main, and the population was already sufficiently exposed to missionary culture.