Opium has been known since ancient times. It became popular in the 18th and 19th centuries to treat ailments, give pleasure, and satisfy addiction. Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859), author of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, was actually an opium drinker since he preferred laudanum – typically opium dissolved in alcohol. Chinese immigrants helped spread the custom of smoking opium or ‘chasing the tiger’.

Romantic poets such as Lord Byron (1788-1824) and Percy Shelley (1792-1822), took it for medicinal and recreational purposes, and Bramwell Brontë (1817-1848), brother of the famous Brontë sisters, was an addict. Opium featured as a home remedy in Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861), and many ‘baby soothers’ contained opium, causing the death of some by malnutrition. A House of Commons report on coroners’ inquests 1837–38 showed opium responsible for a third of deaths. In 1839 opiates accounted for 186 poisonings.

It was also used for suicides. The 1888 death of Mattie Blaylock, Wyatt Earp’s romantic companion, was recorded as suicide by opium poisoning .

Opium was especially favoured in the Fens of eastern England. In the 1860s a Dr Henry Julian Hunter reported: A man in South Lincolnshire complained that his wife had spent £100 on opium since he married… and many never take their beer without dropping a piece of opium into it. A Dr Harper working at a local dispensary was surprised at the longevity of the local opium eaters. A Morning Chronicle reporter witnessed a woman in a druggist in Ely ask for a pennyworth of laudanum and drink it with utmost unconcern before his startled eyes.’

The appearance of opium dens in Britain, France and America – often in back alleys in bad neighbourhoods – at least kept the addicts and the public apart, but later generated a backlash and opium’s use declined.

There was also an early 20th century vogue for morphine, derived from opium, including in Nashville, Tennessee, where a Jane Thomas related that they had just begun inhaling morphine here, when she was at a fashionable party.

Heroin, derived from morphine in 1874, was once legal. As recently as the 1950s, heroin was a medicine prescribed by family doctors. A 1955 Times leader column headline read – ‘The Case for Heroin’, the article saying there were then only about 47 British heroin addicts. According to Dr James Mills, a historian, they were mostly doctors or their middle class patients: In the 1930s it was really the well-to-do crowd.

Ether was once a fashionable drug, especially in Ireland, as temperance campaigners thought it better than alcohol. In the 1830s, USA college students threw ‘ether frolic’ parties, and in the 1930s in Upper Silesia, Poland, some village school pupils regularly drank ether and had to be sent home.

In 1772 Joseph Priestley discovered nitrous oxide gas. Enthusiasts, especially medical students, began to whiff this laughing gas at ‘revels’. The poets William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) both tried it, and there were public demonstrations, with paying customers watching others become intoxicated.

Lesser known drugs were chloral hydrate, a sedative taken to counter insomnia and mixed with alcohol to produce the notorious ‘Mickey Finn’ – and, occasionally and at great risk, chloroform .

By the 1840s cannabis preparations were common medicines, although it soon found other uses and by the 1890s the House of Commons heard that The Lunatic Asylums of India are filled with ganja smokers. One MP called cannabis the most horrible intoxicant the world has yet produced. Cannabis became illegal in the UK in 1928.

Coca leaves have been chewed in South America for centuries but cocaine was not isolated until 1855. In 1863 Angelo Mariani, marketed his cocaine-infused wine, Vin Mariani. Pope Leo XIII was an enthusiast, awarding the wine a Vatican gold medal. Many writers loved cocaine or cocaine wine, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) and Jules Verne (1828-1905). Auguste Bartholdi said that if he had taken Vin Mariani beforehand he would have designed the Statue of Liberty much taller.

In Atlanta, USA, John Pemberton made coca wine, replacing wine with syrup after Prohibition and renaming it Coca-Cola: offering the virtues of coca without the vices of alcohol. By then, cocaine was sold over-the-counter. In 1900 Sears & Roebuck in the US sold a Peruvian Wine of Coca which sustains and refreshes both the body and brain…

In 1884 Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) said cocaine brings exhilaration and lasting euphoria… Long intensive physical work is performed without fatigue. Some of Freud’s patients, to whom he recommended cocaine, ended up addicted. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes described cocaine as transcendentally stimulating and clarifying to the mind…

However, attitudes changed. In 1903 the American Journal of Pharmacy described cocaine-users as bohemians, gamblers, high- and low-class prostitutes, night porters, bell boys, burglars, racketeers, pimps, and casual labourers .

Still, it persisted among the smart set. Cole Porter wrote: I’m sure that if I took even one sniff – that would bore me terrifically too – but he was a user. So was the actress Tallulah Bankhead who joked: Cocaine habit-forming? Of course not – I ought to know. I’ve been using it for years. At one London club between the wars cocaine was slipped to customers in packets as soon as they paid, and in 1916 Harrods offered a special kit, including cocaine, to send soldiers at the front.

Amphetamine, an early designer drug, first made in 1887, was sold in 1934 as a decongestant under the trade-name Benzedrine. During World War II, amphetamines were used by both the Allied and Axis forces to combat fatigue. Methamphetamine was launched in Germany in 1938 and initially sold freely. German troops used it, especially on the harsh eastern front, to improve alertness and morale. The British distributed ‘wake up’ pills to military personnel, including large quantities at the Battle of El Alamein, and Benzedrine was widely used by the US military.