by Lucy Inglis
The 1870s and 80s saw a distinct shift towards legislation by the ‘improvement societies’. Largely, they were modelled on the temperance movement, which had always been in the vanguard of ways to ban intoxicants. The British temperance movement had gone down the legislative route as early as 1853 with the formation of the United Kingdom Alliance in Manchester. Inspired by the American state of Maine’s legislative lead in 1851, the purpose of the Alliance was ‘to call forth and direct an enlightened public opinion to procure the total and immediate suppression of the traffic in all intoxicating liquors or beverages’.1
It is difficult to overestimate the strong feelings that developed towards social order and intoxicants in the late nineteenth century amongst the middle classes of Britain and America. Rising wealth and standards of living had resulted in a class of people for whom maintaining a constant and comfortable steady state was all, and who were alarmed by the social disorder visible in towns and cities when working men and women celebrated payday, rather than by the long-term debilitating effects of alcoholism. Their answer was to attempt to extend the control and order present in their own lives, out to wider society. These social-improvement movements had their detractors: John Stuart Mill, the utilitarian philosopher, attacked the Alliance, and prohibition in general, in his 1859 essay On Liberty: ‘And though the impracticability of executing the law has caused its repeal in several of the States which had adopted it, including [Maine], an attempt has notwithstanding been commenced, and is prosecuted with considerable zeal by many of the professed philanthropists, to agitate for a similar law in this country.’2
Mill saw trade of any commodity as a natural extension of society, but his views were in direct opposition to those who wanted to push towards a politically enforced utopia, rather than an individually chosen one. Because the changes in society brought about by urbanization and the Industrial Revolution had both concentrated certain problems, and made them more visible, the need to deal with them was more urgent. In 1879, the Habitual Drunkards Act was passed through the British Parliament. Although the Act was largely unsuccessful – because it required a patient to surrender themselves to enforced rehabilitation for up to one year, and also to be able to pay for that year’s treatment – it did address one fundamental issue: voluntary admission and the desire to seek help.
The Drunkards Act was at the very beginning of true understanding about addiction. Seeger, the otherwise anonymous pioneer who wrote to the Boston Medical Journal in 1833, was far ahead of his time: ‘Sir,—I observed in yesterday’s Northampton Courier an article from your Journal upon Opium Eating, in which you acknowledge not to know a remedy against that fatal practice; and any one acquainted with such a thing, is invited by you to communicate it . . . I consider this practice generally a real and complicated disease’; and the doctors and social commentators of the 1870s were rapidly coming to similar conclusions.3 Two camps were set up: those who believed that addiction was not only ‘bodily deterioration, [but] lapsed moral sense as well’ and those who believed addiction was both symptom and cause of some greater imbalance within the individual.4 These two camps persist today, in both society and legislation.
Unlike America, where the addiction of women and the dangers this presented to society were front and centre in the debates surrounding morphinism and alcohol, Britain and Europe focussed largely on working people of both sexes. The European Industrial Revolution had changed the way people lived so dramatically, in a way not yet seen in America, that opiates had become the drug of the masses in ways that were intimately tied to their working lives. The need to understand this relationship between the functions of working people and their addictions, rather than the need for oblivion pursued by prostitutes, the destitute or those harmed by war, led to a very different approach to addiction on the European side of the Atlantic.
The Society for the Study and Cure of Inebriety was founded in Britain in 1884, as activists saw the need for an understanding of addiction because ‘We know but too well, much of the evil that arises from intemperate drinking; but of the origin and development of intemperate habits in the individual, we know next to nothing.’5 It was formed largely as a pressure group to lobby the government over the inadequacy of the Drunkards Act, and the inaugural address of 25 April by Norman Shanks Kerr included an extraordinary opening that went to the heart of the study of addiction, listing ‘constitution and temperament’, mental and psychological ‘susceptibilities’, ‘environment’ and ‘inherited predilections’ as key areas for investigation.6
The same year, Kerr presided over the programme of the Dalrymple Home for Inebriates in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, ‘prettily situated on the banks of the Colne’, with sixteen beds available.7 Other rehabilitation centres existed in Derbyshire and Scotland, and also one specializing in the treatment of women in Kennington, London, but Dalrymple was properly funded and well organized.
Kerr was the leading British addiction doctor of the late nineteenth century, advocating complete abstinence from all intoxicants. He was chair of the British Medical Association’s Inebriates Legislation Committee, the BMA’s lobbying arm, and in 1888 they campaigned successfully to get the Inebriates Act through Parliament. Strong political agitation had also seen the Truck Act the previous year, which stopped workers receiving payment in alcohol. The Inebriates Act was an amendment of the Drunkards Act, ‘inebriates’ referring to drug addiction as well as alcoholism, and allowing for compulsory detention of the patient. Kerr, whose contribution to the field of addiction is undeniable, in 1890 coined the term ‘narcomania’ during a lecture in Christiania, Norway.8
Kerr’s general demeanour is, to put it politely, Victorian. His strict rules, unfortunate terminology for those he deemed morally inadequate, and lifelong abstinence from all substances except large meals, in particular turtle soup, can make him seem pompous, even objectionable, yet the best of his writing reflects his understanding of the nature of addiction:
The continuous and victorious struggle of these heroic souls with their hereditary enemy – an enemy more powerful because ever leading its treacherous life within their breasts, presents to my mind such a glorious conflict, such an august spectacle, as should evoke the highest efforts of the painter and the sculptor.9
Friedr. Bayer et comp.: ‘Plenty of natural curiosity and two kitchen stoves’10
In the same year that Kerr gave his lecture in Norway, two Scottish doctors reported to the British Medical Association at their grand headquarters at 429 The Strand on the results they had seen using diacetylmorphine on frogs and more unfortunate rabbits, which acted on the spinal cord and respiratory system. Although interesting, neither the doctors nor the BMA seemed to find anything of particular value in the research, and the opportunity to claim the ‘invention’ of diacetylmorphine for Britain was passed over again.
Charles Alder Wright continued his work at St Mary’s, although he had moved onto acetylating camphor in the hopes of making more effective soap, stern stuff no doubt, as well as experimenting with fireworks. Like Matthiessen, he died young, in 1894, from the complications of diabetes.
Then, in 1897, a research chemist named Heinrich Dreser took a job with a company called Bayer in Germany. Bayer, founded on 1 August 1863 in Elberfeld, had originally specialized in dyes, but soon diversified into the manufacture of medicines. They were, as their own website proudly proclaims, ‘a 19th century startup with tremendous potential’.11 Quite how much potential, none of them could have known at the time.
Dreser, who is most often credited – wrongly – with the invention of heroin, was in charge of a development team including Arthur Eichengrün and Felix Hoffmann, who were in contact with both Edinburgh and London and watched developments there and elsewhere with interest.
Eichengrün in particular was, like Dreser, a shrewd manipulator of teamwork to his own ends, and arguably the pivotal character in the process. It is disputed whether he or Hoffmann synthesized diacetylmorphine, and then aspirin from sal
icylic acid, in the same fortnight in 1897, but Eichengrün was the senior chemist, and Hoffmann a technician. Eichengrün was rightly famous: a prolific scientist who held forty-seven patents. In his lifetime he was best known for creating a silver proteinate marketed as Protargol, the go-to gonorrhea treatment for fifty years, until penicillin. When he left Bayer soon after the discoveries of 1897, it was to establish his own company. When the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, Eichengrün, who was Jewish, was running a successful business but had to take an Aryan associate. He was forced into selling the company five years later, and then imprisoned in Theresienstadt concentration camp forty miles outside Prague in 1944, aged seventy-six. From there, he wrote to Bayer detailing his work in the development of aspirin, by then one of the world’s most successful drugs, and asking for help. Bayer filed it neatly in their archives, and left the most successful research chemist they had ever had exactly where he was. Although released soon afterwards, dying peacefully aged eighty-two in 1949, Eichengrün’s place in the creation of aspirin and heroin had been supplanted in the official histories by Hoffmann and Dreser, and is rarely mentioned now.
Of the two drugs, aspirin was regarded as the most dangerous at the time, mainly because of the risk of bleeding in the stomach. Thus, in a single fortnight, three men were responsible for the world’s most successful legal drug, and its most successful illegal one.
Dreser tested both drugs on himself, and some of Bayer’s workers, before the products went for animal testing. Amongst his many achievements, Dreser has the dubious credit of introducing large-scale animal testing to the pharmaceutical industry. He also published two papers in 1898 which ensured his lasting association with diamorphine’s early days. One was on the pharmacology of derivatives, and the other on ‘the effect of some morphine derivatives on respiration’, revealing that, specifically, in the diacetylmorphine experiments, he had been looking for a drug that would treat advanced lung disease, and in particular tuberculosis, which was rife at the time.12 Studies on sufferers indicated that it really did stop them coughing, made them feel calm, and as a sedative, helped them get a good night’s sleep: diacetylmorphine seemed almost miraculous in its effects. Even better, the patients liked it, and almost always asked to continue the treatment. Dreser, following the trend for ‘heroic’ medicine in the late nineteenth century, named Bayer’s diacetylmorphine preparation ‘diamorphine’, gave it the brand name Heroin, and put in for the patent, granted the following year.
It is an indicator of how intense experimentation and competition were between these large industrial chemists in the late nineteenth century that Joseph von Mering, working for E. Merck in Darmstadt, also produced diamorphine in the same year as the Bayer team. Yet Mering thought other derivatives would be better at treating lung disease, and so passed over diamorphine in their favour. He published on the subject for The Merck Report, but it was only later that he came to see the error of his decision.
Heroin was a tremendous success, marketed across Europe and the United States by 1900. Tubercular patients, and others suffering advanced lung disease, could not pronounce themselves cured, but their symptoms were reduced dramatically and instantly. They felt well.
Originally, there were two main preparations of heroin. The first was the pure diamorphine synthesized by Eichengrün and Hoffmann, C21H23NO5, a bitter, white, crystalline powder soluble in alcohol, or to be mixed with sugar to be sold as pills.13 Heroin hydrochloride – made by the addition of hydrochloric acid at the end stage of the cooking process, and with the molecular formula C21H24ClNO5 – was available by 1899, and soluble in water. These two versions of heroin are still the main starting points for the ways the drug is consumed now, and their properties dictate how.
Pure diamorphine is quite volatile, with a low melting point of 173 degrees centigrade, making it more suited to smoking. As a ‘salt’, heroin hydrochloride has the advantage of being more stable, but has a higher melting point of 243–4 degrees and decomposes with heat rather than releasing the powerfully intoxicating vapours of the pure diamorphine. It is, however, water-soluble, making it more suitable for injecting, taking orally, or sniffing, where it will pass across the mucous membranes of the nose very quickly.
Heroin is converted to morphine in the body almost instantly, but the initial feeling is much more intense, which made it more popular with patients. Early marketing was aimed squarely at those with serious lung conditions, and they tended to remain on the medicine until they died, so the addiction issues were not marked until use spread into the general population. Heroin pills, ridiculously cheap and easy to make, were retailing over the counter in packets of a hundred, some of them flavoured with rosewater and coated with chocolate. One cough syrup was marketed as ‘suitable for the palate of the most discerning adult or capricious child’. My personal favourite is the idea of Syrup Toluheras, each dose comprising: 20 mg heroin, 150 mg cannabis, tartar emetic, chloroform, alcohol and, naturally, syrup of tolu from Colombia. Letters from concerned doctors were soon appearing in medical journals on both sides of the Atlantic, but the genie was out of the bottle, or at least in millions of bottles on thousands of chemists’ shelves. Multitudes of proprietary medicines, similar to the original soothing syrups, were soon in shops and catalogues, most of them sold as cough mixtures and containing combinations of heroin, strychnine, quinine and terpin, a popular expectorant at the time. Owing to the bitterness of heroin itself, sugar featured heavily in almost all of them.
By 1900, Bayer were retailing Heroin, Heroin Hydrochloride and Aspirin in the United States by mail order, ‘samples available’ from Bayer’s outlets at 40 Stone Street, New York. The same advertisement also features Eichengrün’s Protargol, as well as a variety of worming preparations, and a treatment for piles. The essential human ailments vary little over the centuries, it seems.
The synthesis of heroin happened at a key moment in history. Although it was largely overlooked for some two decades, the discovery of its potential could hardly have been better timed to ensure its global success. Then in 1901 heroin overdose begins to appear in the British Medical Journal. The following year, leading American specialist Thomas D. Crothers introduced the term ‘narcomanias’ in his work on opiate addiction. In 1903, London junior doctor Sophie Frances Hickman sparked a nationwide manhunt when she disappeared from her post at the Royal Free Hospital. Hickman was found dead in Richmond Park some months later, next to intravenous morphine paraphernalia. The worst fears of the medical community had been realized, and all too late: world events were conspiring to create a climate that brought heroin to the forefront of medical science, and forced it underground in a way that birthed a new kind of organized crime, the like of which had never been seen before.
The American–Philippine War and Bishop Brent
At exactly the same time as Bayer’s Heroin met the world market, from 1899–1902 America was involved in a war with the Philippines. It seems now like the preposterous escalation of a bar brawl, but it had serious consequences for the people of the Philippines, and also on US drug policy and the international trade in opium.
Cuba was fighting for independence from Spain, a long, wearisome campaign of spats and wars, the latter phase of which started in 1868. Ordinary Americans, sick to death of their own war and the depression that followed, did not want to be involved in another, particularly a foreign one. In order to be seen to protect its interests, America deployed the rather feeble warship USS Maine to Havana in late January 1898. She had been a long time in the shipyard, and when she was launched, technology had moved on. On 15 February, an internal explosion resulted in the sinking of the ship with the loss of 258 crew members.
The mysterious sinking of the Maine caused a wave of outrage across America, fuelled by myriad newspaper reports featuring spurious stories about how and why the ship had gone down – Mines! Spies! Sabotage! – and of Spanish atrocities against the Cuban people. On 19 April, Congress passed joint resolutions supporting Cuban independence. A
US force would be stationed there, it stated, and removed as soon as the Spanish were out, because as the amendment named after Colorado Senator Henry Moore Teller stated, ‘the island of Cuba is, and by right should be, free and independent’.14 The Americans declared war on the Spanish on 20/21 April 1898.
Even now, the true motives for America entering the Spanish–American War remain unclear. Some maintain that it was as a result of a propaganda battle between the print empires of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. Others point to America’s intention to take from Spain the island they had already tried, and failed, to buy. Wars rarely happen for one reason alone, but America’s war with Spain did have remarkable and unintended consequences. The Teller amendment, stating as it did that Cuba would not be occupied by America after Spanish withdrawal, did not mention the Spanish colonies of the Philippines, Puerto Rico or Guam. America promptly invaded Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico, and Spain conceded the war on 17 July 1898.
Guam was visited by a US warship that fired warning shots on entering the harbour, which the locals thought was a cheerful greeting. They were informed about the war, news of which had not yet reached the tiny Pacific outpost, and the Spanish soldiers stationed there promptly acquiesced, and the whole business was despatched with minimal fuss.
The Filipinos, however, were not going to make things so easy. In over 300 years of Spanish rule, the Philippines had developed a complex social structure and a solid, Spanish-speaking middle class. They were exposed to European ideas, but remained firmly rooted in their Eastern geographical identity. In particular, their strong trading culture with the Chinese went back to the tenth century, and many layers of Filipino and Chinese interactions existed: from simple business to intermarriage, as well as class distinctions and particular names for people originating in different parts of China, Canton, Fujian and Guangdong especially. From the beginning of Spanish rule, the Chinese had been troublesome in the Philippines, and marked out for special consideration, particularly as far as trading was concerned. First they were pirates, then tricksy merchants, then general traders. Sangley was the common term applied to those of pure Chinese origin, and mestizo de sangley to those of mixed heritage. Over the centuries, although almost all of these Chinese-Filipinos came to regard themselves as simply Filipino – specializing in manual trades such as building and agriculture, food industries and in some cases money-lending – to outsiders such as the Spanish, British and Americans, they were a different and very useful group, trading as they did, continually, with China. During the nineteenth century, and the Chinese diaspora, many more Chinese arrived in the Philippines, and the government began to regard them as a social problem. And with them, of course, they had brought that particularly Chinese habit: opium.