"Mania Americana": Narcotic Addiction and Modernity in the United States, 1870-1920

Abstract

The ancients paid sacred homage to Morpheus, god of sleep and dreams; and now, in the midst of an age of intelligence and advancement, we find a vast army of men and women bowing at the shrine of the arch-fiend Morphia, named after the classic deity of old. —Leslie E. Keeley, M.D., 1897 Despite its long association with Asian cultures, habitual narcotic use gained little public attention in the West before the publication of Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in 1822. De Quincey's text was popular on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and its conclusions about the “pains” involved in breaking off opium use were echoed by frequent reports from nineteenth-century physicians whose otherwise cured patients were sometimes unable to stop taking their narcotic medications. Nonetheless, few antebellum Americans felt themselves or their society to be particularly threatened by narcotics. The vast publicity created by the various temperance movements helped generate public anxiety over the widespread social consequences of heavy drinking, but fear of narcotic drugs did not particularly grip the public imagination. This relative obscurity would not outlast the century.1