'The Unhappy Victims of This Habit': Drug Addiction as a Problem in Nineteenth-Century America

Recorded September 22, 2022. An online seminar by Dr Kelly Gray as
part of the Medical & Health Humanities Seminar Series in
association with Trinity Long Room Hub. Drug dependency became an
increasingly serious problem in nineteenth-century America, and
most of this use began with medical use. The problem remained
largely hidden until the late 1860s, because habitual opiate users
did not behave erratically and therefore went largely unnoticed.
Americans of the era learned about drug addiction from reading
accounts of such use abroad, and many dismissed the notion that the
problem existed at home. There was almost no drug regulation in the
U.S. at the time. Consequently, people did not associate addiction
with criminality, but the rate of use escalated. National
regulation emerged in the early twentieth century in response to
international considerations, and it was facilitated by the fact
that, increasingly, drug habitués were young, marginalized men
whose use did not originate with medical need. They received little
sympathy. Elizabeth Kelly Gray is an associate professor of History
and assistant chair of the Department of History at Towson
University. She received her Ph.D. from the College of William and
Mary. This December her first book, Habit Forming: Drug Addiction
in America, 1776-1914, will be published by Oxford University
Press. Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/