Snyder 1

What role did addiction/substance abuse play in the lives of 19th-century Americans?

On this subject, there are generally two examples that come to mind when substance abuse

in 19th-century America is discussed—those being opium and alcohol. The former came to

be as doctors began prescribing this substance frequently for nearly everything, and the

later fallback was that opiates were highly addictive. Several historians have looked into

the history of drug use/substance abuse and drug policies, one of whom being David T.

Cartwright. He has several books on the subject, most notable to this research is his book

Dark Paradise: Opiate Addiction in America before 1940.1 Prior to Cartwright’s research, it

was often believed that opiate addicts had become so because of certain legal causes—

Cartwright argues that it was because of how frequently opiates were prescribed.
2
Cartwright also observes how opium transitions from being an “upper-class” drug to one

that was easily obtained even by the poor and criminal.

On the same topic of opium, there is also the substance laudanum, which was also used

frequently to treat pain or other illnesses and was even more addictive. Elizabeth Gray

Kelly talks about public perception of alcohol, opium, and laudanum in medical treatments

and how they were viewed by the public and the medical community at the time. In one of

her lectures title “Drug Addiction in 19th Century America,”3 Gray makes an interesting

observation that when blacks or native Americans used drugs like opium, it was seen as

wrong—but when whites used opium, it was almost seen as a sort of intellectual thing.

Gray’s research helps expand the understanding of how the public perceived drug

use/addiction to now include racial and gender differentiation. In general, white men were
1
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/inside-story-americas-19th-century-opiate-addiction-180967673/
2
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674005853
3
https://www.c-span.org/video/?328202-1/drug-addiction-19th-century-america
 Snyder 2

seen as the most capable of using the drug “responsibly” and were “less susceptible” to

addiction or “habits.”

Another historian named Caroline Jean Acker specialized in opiate addiction and medical

history from 1890 and on—she wrote a book called Creating the American Junkie: Addiction

Research in the Classic Era of Narcotic Control.4 In this book, Acker mainly focuses on the

legal repercussions of drug policy with the Harrison act in the early 20 th century, but does

spend some time reflecting on how drug abuse came to be such a common problem in the

transition from the 19th to 20th century. The core of Acker’s research however comes when

she discusses how psychiatrists and psychologists of the time first created the stigma of

addiction with the assumption that addicts were inherently flawed (mentally,

psychologically, criminally, etc.)5 Acker’s research helps define how the public perception

of addicts changed as addiction became more common.

A surprising contribution to addiction history was not a historian at all but a doctor and

medical chief, Stephen Kandall. His book, Substance and Shadow: Women and Addiction in

the United States, offers a new perspective of substance abuse in 19 th century America by

focusing on how it affected women during the time and how this was perceived by others.
6
As mentioned by others as well, women struggling with addiction—in this case, drug

addiction, were often overlooked and when medical professionals eventually wrote about

the dangers of drug habits, women were not the primary concern. Kandall even notes how

the majority of opium addicts towards the turn of the 19th-century were women because of

how commonly opiates were prescribed for “women’s issues.”

4
https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/history/people/emeriti/acker.html
5
https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/creating-american-junkie
6
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674853614
 Snyder 3

On the same note, another contributor to addiction history in 19 th century America is

another medical professional named Dan Malleck, with a few books on other subjects

within addiction history but in different locations—his primary work is a collection of

primary sources called Drugs, Alcohol, and Addiction in the Long Nineteenth Century.
7
Through this compilation Malleck has helped shape how drug-use evolved from certain

groups to others as well as how it was perceived by medical professionals and others at the

time.

Another historian named Howard Markel, who mainly focuses on the history of medicine

and primarily on the use of cocaine in medicine in the late 19 th century—all of this is

detailed in his book An Anatomy of Addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted, and the

Miracle Drug Cocaine. 8Sigmund Freud’s interactions with cocaine are generally known

among historians, but Markel focuses also on the struggles of William Halsted, an American

surgeon and pioneer of modern anesthesiology. Markel, in his research, helps expand the

focus of drug abuse in 19th century America from opium to also include cocaine, which as he

mentioned, was often used as a treatment for opium habits. In many cases, the addictions

were simply transferred from one substance to the other. Markel does the research to

include the history of cocaine abuse in 19th-century America.

A contributor of addiction history named William L. White focuses on the rhetoric of

addiction in American history, since addiction was not a common phrase or word used to

describe the issues that came with substance abuse at the time. In his essay The Lessons of

Language: Historical Perspectives on the Rhetoric of Addiction, White goes through the

history of words that were used to describe drug/substance abuse, most common of them

7
https://brocku.ca/applied-health-sciences/health-sciences/faculty-research/faculty-directory/dan-malleck-phd/
8
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/SHAD27020189
 Snyder 4

all was the word “habit.”9 He argues that context can also be used to understand whether or

not an individual’s substance use could be classified as an addiction—notably through their

actions and how the substance use affects their day to day life, if at all. In most cases, he

argues, when the word “habit” was used it was most likely what is defined today as an

addiction.

9
http://pop.williamwhitepapers.com/pr/dlm_uploads/2004-Lessons-of-Language-Addiction-Rhetoric.pdf