From Merry Intoxication to Isolating Addiction: A Historical Perspective
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The scientific story of addiction wasn’t developed until the early nineteenth century, when two pioneering physicians – Founding Father Benjamin Rush in America and Thomas Trotter in Scotland – performed the first studies of alcoholism. But the problem of addiction already had begun to emerge by the turn of the seventeenth century, as Shakespeare’s audience, watching Henry (V, was no doubt keenly aware. The dangers of intoxication, palpable in 1598, would only increase over the next two hundred years. The high offered by beer and wine, while significant, would pale in comparison to the stupor brought on by harder substances.
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Gin drinking exploded at the end of the seventeenth century when a politically motivated embargo on French brandy led William of Orange to encourage the distillation of spirits instead. The much higher alcohol content of gin, nicknamed “mother’s ruin,” produced an epidemic of excessive drunkenness, leading to five new acts passed by parliament in response to the gin craze of the 1720s and 1730s. William Hogarth’s Gin Lane features gin drinkers, a stupefied bunch compared to the cheerful drinkers of Beer Street.
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From 1830 on, opium became more available in England, through trade with India. Opium eaters consumed larger and more potent quantities of the intoxicant. A series of physicians trumpeted the drug’s curative powers, only later discovering the dangers of addiction. Opium had been available in the form of laudanum through the medieval and early modern periods, but after trade with China in the 1860s introduced the practice of smoking it, that became the primary method in England. Doped on gin and opium, the drinker and smoker were no longer elevated into sociability and wit; they were pulled into antisocial behavior. Gin drinkers were accused of abandoning their families to fight in the streets; the grain provoked violence. Opium eaters burrowed into dens, sleepily oblivious to the world around them. Intoxication had tipped into addiction.
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Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the merry intoxicant migrated from the Elizabethan alehouse to the Victorian opium den; from a daytime gathering of thousands in an open theatre, cheering the wit of their favorite players, to a solitary chamber in the dead of night. Shakespeare’s fairy-tale fantasies of wealth, love, and happiness transformed into fever dreams, typified by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan”. As Coleridge recounts in the preface to the poem, after taking an anodyne of opium, he fell into a feverish hallucination; upon awaking from his dream, he vaguely recalled his poem, composed while asleep, but lost once interrupted: “All the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone had been cast. “The writer no longer haunts the taverns of the Bank side, surrounded by the men who enact his characters and the audiences who love them. Shakespeare’s beer drinker turns into Coleridge’s opium eater, intoxication becomes addiction. Falstaff’s advice to his imaginary sons – “to addict themselves to sack” – is a tantalizing remnant of a merrier, theatrical time, and an astute warning about the isolating dangers to come.
