Emperors of Dreams

"Jay’s book is in the same area as my first book The Making of Addiction , and is a really accessible read. He does a calm run-through of luxurious drug use and orthodox drug use. One is accepted and one is not. He looks at the way our bodies are policed, and how our cultural attitudes and policies are based on ideas influenced by fear and intolerance. Addiction becomes categorised as a disease during that period. There is the whole temperance movement, which thought that alcohol was the root of all evil. And piggy-backing on that is the anti-opiate movement and the idea of opiate addiction. But there was no legislation. There was a great deal of moral condemnation, but the politics involved in it were quite complicated because at the time Britain was involved in the Opium Wars with China. There was a great deal of religious involvement because appetites were seen to be running amok, and there was a great deal of crime involved with drinking, as there is now. Opiate use, on the other hand, was a problem but it wasn’t viewed as so pressing, because generally people just sat tight and got smashed but didn’t do harm to others. That excuse for leaving opiates alone was used in parliament in the late 19th century, and there was no legislation against it until after the First World War. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Yes, she was taking it for medical reasons – laudanum too, perhaps. All the opiate derivatives were the only good palliative drugs around, until Aspirin came on the market in the 1890s. So opium was a godsend, especially because of the state of early 19th century sanitation – opium kills pain and bungs you up, which was just terrific. If you had a chronic illness you could be taking opium for 30 or 40 years, as Gladstone did, and no-one would accuse you of being an addict although you were undoubtedly were. People such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas de Quincey who took opium were reviled because they took it luxuriously. But interestingly, both of them said that they first started taking it for medical reasons. I wanted to avoid the politics and look into the nature of addiction. I started by looking at the origins of addictions in the medical texts, for explanations about what it actually is. Instead of finding the answer, I found confusion, theories, heroes, altruism, bizarre treatments, diets, deaths and dishonesty. I didn’t find out what addiction really is. Personally I think addiction is a disease. I am not a medic or a scientist and I must emphasise that, but I do think it is not a good idea to treat a drug addiction with a drug. “If you had a chronic illness you could be taking opium for 30 or 40 years and no-one would accuse you of being an addict although you were undoubtedly were.” Morphine, for example, was the first refined opiate and it led to a great deal of morphine addiction, especially after the hypodermic needle was introduced in the mid-19th century. It was calculated by a Dr Jennings in the 1890s that one in four doctors in England was a morphine addict. It was such a problem that when [the German drug company] Bayer came up with heroin in that decade, it was first marketed as a cure for morphine! So it is great progress to have these refined drugs, but there are also enormous problems that go with them. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I am very pleased that there are more and more women in medicine now. I think that is terrific. But I am concerned about the medicalisation of society, and the way that many aspects of our lives can now be treated with drugs. I noticed in the paper the other day that they are coming up with a drug to stop you drinking. I am sure that these things can be helpful in some cases, but to medicalise people when there are other issues that need to be addressed first is not a good idea."