Opium use didn't produce as much resistance asalcohol, or incite the interest of the temperance movement until very latein the nineteenth century when it became obvious that permissivenesstowards drugs and double standards in international trade opened manyethical questions for the government.

    Opium was easy to come by--physicians dispensed opiates directly to patients or wrote prescriptions for them, and pharmacists sold them over the counter. There were numerous items of patent medication containing opium or morphine as well. Godfrey's Cordial was particularly popular in England, where it was sold by the thousands of bottles, and administered not only to adults, but to infants and toddlers as well. Even Marx reported in Capital about the English habit of"dosing their babies" with opium.

    While the medicinal use of opiates was perfectly acceptable in Victorian times, the "social," recreational use was borderline respectable, although it was legal for a long time. Of course, it was always hard to tell where the medicinal use would cross over into the field of recreation, particularly with the issue of class bearing upon availability of alternative forms of "entertainment."

    In 1873, an English physician noted:

...Amongst the three millions and three-quarters [people in London] there are to be found some persons here and there who take [opium] as a luxury, though by far the greater number of whose who take it in anything like quantity do so for some old neuralgia or rheumatic malady, and began under medical advice. Neither is it to be found over the agricultural or manufacturing districts, save in the most scattered and casual way. The genuine opium-eating districts are the ague and fen districts of Norfolkand Lincolnshire. There it is not casual, accidental, or rare, but popular, habitual, and common.

Anyone who visits such a town as Louth or Wisbeach, and strolls about the streets on a Saturday evening, watching the country people as they do their marketing, may soon satisfy himself that the crowds in the chemists' shops come for opium; and they have a peculiar way of getting it. They go in, lay down their money, and receive the opium pills in exchange without saying a word. For instance, I was at Wisbeach one evening in August 1871; went into a chemist's shop; laid a penny on the counter. The chemist said - "The best?" I nodded. He gave me a pill box and took up the penny; and so the purchase was completed without my having uttered a syllable. You offer money, and get opium as a matter of course. This may show how familiar the custom is....

In these districts it is taken by people of all classes, but especially by the poor and miserable, and by those who in other districts would seek comfort from gin or beer.

    Pharmaceutical research and investment into opiate drugs as the most effective pain killers brought about opium derivatives, like heroin, whose use still hasn't diminished, but whose social contextualization and acceptability have in the meantime completely changed.

    For a person from a non-working class, where "keeping up appearances" was order of the day, opium consumption was a less conspicuous and still a legal way to indulge in a break away from Victorian binds that prescribed an unfaltering strength of will and constant sobriety for every individual in society. The necessity of a split between public images of sensible, responsible British citizens and unaccountable drug users created a culture of opium dens - like the one frequented by Sherlock Holmes - in which the mask of decency and sobriety could be shaken off away from the public eye.

    Numerous Victorian literary works and authors, who usually came from environments that didn't make their living working for wages, dealt with opiates whose function was sometimes medicinal, but frequently also was a way to re-vivify imagination or relocate into a world more colorful than Victorian England.