Opium was legal in Britain in the early 1800s, with British people consuming between 10 and 20 tonnes of the stuff every year. Powdered opium was dissolved in alcohol as a tincture called laudanum, which was freely available as a painkiller and even present in cough medicine for babies. Many late-18th and 19th-century literary figures were influenced by opium, including Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Keats and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Thomas De Quincey found fame with his autobiographical Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Drinking opium in this way produced mild narcotic effects but was also habit-forming – society at this time was therefore pervaded by high-functioning opium addicts, including many among the lower classes who were looking to numb the tedium of working and living in an industrialised urban world. But while laudanum helped inspire a few poets and fuelled bouts of aristocratic debauchery, drinking it delivered a relatively slow release of opiates into the bloodstream. https://www.theguardian.com/soci ... -wars-china-britain
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