The Making of Addiction: The 'Use and Abuse' of Opium in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Abstract

In The Making of Addiction, Louise Foxcroft aims to present a social and intellectual history of the concept of addiction. Focusing on the use of opiates in nineteenth-century Britain, she argues that ‘while personal accounts reveal that opium experiences remained essentially similar, attitudes to it continued to change’ (p. 165). For Foxcroft there was a marked move away from the perception of opium use ‘as a creative sensibility and an intellectually stimulating experience’ and towards seeing it as ‘a reductive, self-destructive sickness’ (p. 167). A fundamental factor governing this shift was the development of the disease model of drug addiction. Through an examination of cultural and medical representations of opiate use, Foxcroft demonstrates that ideas about drug addiction were born out of a combination of both medical and moral concerns. For many historians of drug and alcohol use, this will be familiar ground. Indeed, one of the key problems with The Making of Addiction is that it offers few new insights into opium use in the nineteenth century. Virginia Berridge's Opium and the People (1981 and 1999), Geoffrey Harding's Opiate Addiction, Morality and Medicine (1988) and Terry Parssinen's Secret Passions, Secret Remedies (1983) all deal with the same topic. While there would still be space for another book on opium in nineteenth-century Britain (especially as much of this literature is over 20 years old), for it to be of value one would expect the author to engage with the latest historiography of drug and alcohol use. Foxcroft states that ‘there are few recent historical works that include accounts of addiction’ (p. 3) but this is simply not the case. Articles by Jessica Warner and Tim Hickman, and books such as Mariana Valverde's Diseases of the Will (1998) and Sarah W. Tracy and Caroline Acker's edited collection Altering American Consciousness (2004), all deal with the construction of addiction. Admittedly, some of these texts consider drugs other than opium (especially alcohol) and in different countries (especially the USA), but this work is important: not only for the purposes of comparison, but also because ideas about addiction moved between drugs and between nations. Whilst Foxcroft does briefly examine the relationship between alcohol and opium, this is relegated to an appendix. Integrating such a discussion into the main text would have helped readers trace the development of addiction and its attachment to different drugs and behaviours.