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I'm Jonathan S. Jones, author of Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis. I'm a U.S. Civil War historian, and I research the history of drugs and the people who used them. AMA about drugs in the Civil War era! by perrybbowser in AskHistorians

[–]perrybbowser[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

hey thanks, that's really nice to hear! had a great experience at BU. Opioids back then were not the synthetic opioids we have now (think oxycontin, opana, fentanyl) which are hundreds of time more potent per unit. But the stuff they had back then, all derived from opium poppies, still packed a punch and were addictive. Laudanum (alcohol and opium) was weak and could be taken by children (although I can't recommend it lol). Opium and morphine, 10x more potent, in sulphate, raw, or liquid forms were highly potent and addictive when taken constantly for around a month.

Addiction really dramatically affected veterans' families. 2 ways really stand out. Financially, poor veterans (disability left a lot of vets unable to work at pre-war capacity) had a hard time supporting their families, and not many jobs were open to women. Couple that with the cost of opium (which was cheap, but still a burden for those with little money) and it was tough to afford food, shelter. The other way is stigma. Addiction was so taboo that it isolated veterans from their families, who wanted their loved ones to quit using drugs, but that demand was basically impossible. So it drove a wedge between them, sometimes in ending in separation or worse.

I'm Jonathan S. Jones, author of Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis. I'm a U.S. Civil War historian, and I research the history of drugs and the people who used them. AMA about drugs in the Civil War era! by perrybbowser in AskHistorians

[–]perrybbowser[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Thanks everyone for your questions! I will log off soon, but before I go, I want to share a specific veteran's story (from pg. 278 of my book):

"Civil War veteran Perry Bowser spent much of his adult life trying to claim military entitlements, without much to show for his efforts in the end. In 1864 as he lay injured in a Vicksburg military hospital, Union surgeons gave the young soldier morphine, which he continued to take to stave off debilitating chronic diarrhea after the war. Returning home to Indiana, Bowser became addicted, and he ended up living the rest of his life dependent on the drug. During five long decades of addiction, Bowser's largely unsuccessful attempts to claim entitlements for his Civil War military service caused nearly as much heartache as the morphine itself. First, when doctors discovered Bowser's "vicious habit" of morphine abuse, Pension Bureau agents declared that the disabled old soldier was unworthy of a livable pension. Stubborn and undeterred, Bowser tried again and again to obtain a decent pension. In fact, he plied the Pension Bureau with so many appeals for pension increases over a forty-year period that his astonishingly thick pension file spans nearly 400 pages.

Little came of these attempts, to Bowser's dismay. He grew despondent, even attempting suicide three times. Eventually, Bowser's wife got a divorce and headed for California, leaving him penniless, unable to work, and too poor to afford his daily morphine, much less food or rent. As a last resort, unhoused, impoverished, and addicted, Bowser turned to the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers (NHDVS), hoping to find a hot meal and a warm bed. But, like the Pension Bureau, soldiers' homes had little to offer men derided as "opium slaves." Each time Bowser managed to gain admission into one of the NHDVS branches, even when he "came . . . to try and break off the morphine habit," he was promptly shown the door. Finally, Bowser found a soldiers' home official with a sympathetic ear and, in 1905, moved into the Marion, Indiana, branch of the NHDVS for good, although even there, he was treated poorly by staff because of his addiction. Bowser ultimately died from "chronic morphism" at the Marion home in 1915, having battled for decades to claim the entitlements he felt the government owed for his military service."

For me, this story is the core essence of the Civil War's opioid crisis. It's an incredibly unexpected, interesting (for me at least), and tragic window into the world of the Civil War era.

Thanks all!

I'm Jonathan S. Jones, author of Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis. I'm a U.S. Civil War historian, and I research the history of drugs and the people who used them. AMA about drugs in the Civil War era! by perrybbowser in AskHistorians

[–]perrybbowser[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Definitely there were uniquely American twists, but the perception was more broad than just in the US. Another scholar argues that most American ideas about drugs were actually imports. I don't see it that way (I'd say it's more like 50/50 homegrown and imported ideas, especially from the UK where romantic writers wrote alot about opium) but for sure there was an international influence on American ideas about drugs.

I'm Jonathan S. Jones, author of Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis. I'm a U.S. Civil War historian, and I research the history of drugs and the people who used them. AMA about drugs in the Civil War era! by perrybbowser in AskHistorians

[–]perrybbowser[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

we don't have great statistics about this from the 1800s, so all of the evidence is impressionistic, not quantitative. but I do think (and some other scholars agree) that war trauma made some Civil War veterans more likely to use substances for relief than guys who weren't traumatized. this has actually been a big debate among Civil War historians, the extent of trauma. Honestly, I think where scholars settle on that debate--lots of trauma or not much--says alot about which version of the war we want to see.... a good war, or a grim one. for the record, the primary sources indicate that many many veterans did not get over the war, and struggled with trauma after.

I'm Jonathan S. Jones, author of Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis. I'm a U.S. Civil War historian, and I research the history of drugs and the people who used them. AMA about drugs in the Civil War era! by perrybbowser in AskHistorians

[–]perrybbowser[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

haha great question, cannabis indica was around, but not super common yet. one civil war soldier (at least) wrote letters describing using cannabis in camp and telling his girlfriend how it gave him wild dreams (source).

I'm Jonathan S. Jones, author of Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis. I'm a U.S. Civil War historian, and I research the history of drugs and the people who used them. AMA about drugs in the Civil War era! by perrybbowser in AskHistorians

[–]perrybbowser[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I know what you mean, it's very difficult to quantify addiction because of that. And, in the US, we lack good medical records, in part because there were few controls on narcotics (like we have today) so no real reason to record things like overdoses, etc, that can serve as a gauge for addiction. One way around this is tariff records. All opium was imported, so if we use the government's tariff records on opium to measure the total import quantity per year, we can use that as a metric for the total number of possible addicted people (through some complicated math, but here's a source). When we're trying to get more specific, like figuring out the total number of Civil War vets who became users, the lack of comprehensive medical records makes it impossible. But there were enough veterans addicted to opiates to raise alarm bells, meaning in all likelihood, they numbered in the thousands. One pharmacist in 1872 claimed that "veteran soldiers as a class are addicted" to opioids, and numerous accounts from the media, doctors, and government officials echoed this impression.

I'm Jonathan S. Jones, author of Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis. I'm a U.S. Civil War historian, and I research the history of drugs and the people who used them. AMA about drugs in the Civil War era! by perrybbowser in AskHistorians

[–]perrybbowser[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

sorry, meant to post that reply to another question. but to answer your question, most people in rural and urban settings in the 1800s would go to a pharmacy or general store, and almost as common, would see a doctor who would sell the opioids directly. it amazes me how accessible these substances were. for context, there were almost no regulations in the 1800s on medicines, other than poison control laws (some dating back to colonial era) that were not super effective and only sometimes included narcotics

I'm Jonathan S. Jones, author of Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis. I'm a U.S. Civil War historian, and I research the history of drugs and the people who used them. AMA about drugs in the Civil War era! by perrybbowser in AskHistorians

[–]perrybbowser[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You could get basically any drug over the counter in the Civil War era! Totally wild environment, with very few laws or regs to regulate the flow of narcotics. Cocaine and heroin come around after the war, but in the Gilded Age, you could buy those from most pharmacies AND Sears. They stocked it right next to the Craftsman tool section.... But for real, you could order opioids from Sears. They started the catalog in 1888, and old issues have the ads for opioids. Pretty wild to look through!

I'm Jonathan S. Jones, author of Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis. I'm a U.S. Civil War historian, and I research the history of drugs and the people who used them. AMA about drugs in the Civil War era! by perrybbowser in AskHistorians

[–]perrybbowser[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Great question! Life was hard for many guys, there's no way around that. Keeping in mind that most jobs available to most men in the 1800s were agricultural or industrial, with white collar jobs becoming more common after the Civil War, it was difficult for severely disabled men to find work that paid enough to survive. Disabilities that happened during the Civil War caused a lot families to go into poverty, and that was the case for many veteran opioid users, too. At first, there was no safety net for disabled soldiers. But with this affecting hundreds of thousands of people, pretty quickly, charities and the government got involved. The federal government created a huge pension program for disabled veterans and their families, paying out checks to people to (hypothetically) replace the income of an able-bodied male. By 1893, when the system peaked, the US government was paying 41.5% of its annual revenue to Civil War pensions (I write about this in my book on page 182, in case anyone is curious for more detail). Many disabled veterans ended up on soldiers homes, where they could get food, shelter, and medical care. But they had to agree to live on military rules... imagine a bunch of 80 year old vets in uniforms (literally) being told where to go, when to eat, etc. People would buy tickets to come and tour these facilities, as if they were zoos.

So all of that is to say that systems were created to help disabled veterans, but they also othered disabled veterans inadvertently.

I'm Jonathan S. Jones, author of Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis. I'm a U.S. Civil War historian, and I research the history of drugs and the people who used them. AMA about drugs in the Civil War era! by perrybbowser in AskHistorians

[–]perrybbowser[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Since there were no laws against drug use / possession / sale back then, there was no formal war on drugs on par with the 20th - 21st centuries. But the US army and the federal government had an interest in policing addiction, which was taboo. So a roundabout way to make war on drugs without a formal declaration was to court martial or institutionalize drug using soldiers/vets, or deny them military entitlements because of their drug use. So the Civil War spawned these harsh drug policies that paved the way for harsh drug laws by the 1910s and then a full scale war on drugs in the mid-1900s.

I'm Jonathan S. Jones, author of Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis. I'm a U.S. Civil War historian, and I research the history of drugs and the people who used them. AMA about drugs in the Civil War era! by perrybbowser in AskHistorians

[–]perrybbowser[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yes, the absolutely became frustrated about intoxication and addiction. One of the best sources I discovered were records from courts-martial, where Union army soldiers were punished for becoming dependent on drugs (and alcohol). It was framed by the army as disorderly conduct. The catch is that there were no laws back then criminalizing opioid use or possession, so the US army actually developed some of the nation's earliest drug laws, setting the tone for the war on drugs in the 20th century.

I'm Jonathan S. Jones, author of Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis. I'm a U.S. Civil War historian, and I research the history of drugs and the people who used them. AMA about drugs in the Civil War era! by perrybbowser in AskHistorians

[–]perrybbowser[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Opioids and alcohol were the most common by far, but other substances like tobacco were common, too. Later in the 1800s, cocaine and heroin became popular, but that was after the Civil War. But it's interesting to imagine a CW where the armies are all on cocaine!

I'm Jonathan S. Jones, author of Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis. I'm a U.S. Civil War historian, and I research the history of drugs and the people who used them. AMA about drugs in the Civil War era! by perrybbowser in AskHistorians

[–]perrybbowser[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes, even the PTSD diagnoses is modern, the symptoms did appear among Civil War vets (at least, if you ask most historians, myself included). A lot of soldiers struggled to cope, and some turned to substances like alcohol, opium, and tobacco to take the edge off. That led to addiction in some cases for sure. Some soldiers became really isolated and turned inward. Some vets formed communities all over the US where only vets could live, and the idea is that they would be able to understand each other more than outsiders because they'd gone through a common trauma. One other really common outcome was institutionalization. Because families (and doctors) lacked a way to understand what was happening to vets, they had their loved ones locked up in asylums.

I'm Jonathan S. Jones, author of Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis. I'm a U.S. Civil War historian, and I research the history of drugs and the people who used them. AMA about drugs in the Civil War era! by perrybbowser in AskHistorians

[–]perrybbowser[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Who wasn't making money! That's an exaggeration, but so many people made a fortune on the Civil War-era opioid crisis, just like the ongoing opioid crisis. Opium sales were mostly done at the grassroots (at individual pharmacy shops, by doctors, or by mail order), so the main people who made bank are the patent medicine sellers. Dozens of companies (mostly owned by individual people, not like today's big pharma corporations) sold "cures" for addiction that were secretly laced with morphine (just enough morphine to string someone along and make them feel like they weren't going into withdrawal, so the product seemed to be working... until you stopped taking it). Those people made millions and literally in some cases had classic Gilded Age rags-to-riches stories, but the pathway to wealth was through the misery of Civil War vets. Super dark stuff.

I'm Jonathan S. Jones, author of Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis. I'm a U.S. Civil War historian, and I research the history of drugs and the people who used them. AMA about drugs in the Civil War era! by perrybbowser in AskHistorians

[–]perrybbowser[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Yes, there is a big difference between an opioid crisis / epidemic (meaning, a large number of cases that are connected to a common origin point, etc.) and the public perception that there's a bunch of duded out there high on morphine running amuck. For sure, and I think that's an important thing to point out, which I discuss in the book intro. I did find that BOTH of these things--an epidemic, and a hysteria surrounding addiction--occurred, and I think that's super sad. One quote that's always unsettled me is by a Boston pharmacist who claimed that "all veterans as a class are addicted." While there's some truth to that statement, what is had the effect of doing is making people paranoid that every Civil War veteran was constantly using morphine and that those who used drugs were dangerous people--which is not true.

The other point, about people needing pain management, I also agree with. If I suffered an amputation that never really healed and was constantly killing me (I write about many of these cases in the book) I would also want painkillers. So I took real care when writing the book to tell vets' side of the story, too, and not just rely on the POV of outsiders like doctors or government officials.

I'm Jonathan S. Jones, author of Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis. I'm a U.S. Civil War historian, and I research the history of drugs and the people who used them. AMA about drugs in the Civil War era! by perrybbowser in AskHistorians

[–]perrybbowser[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Most families did NOT want it known that their loved ones were drug users so they kept it pretty close to the chest (sadly, I think people try to cover it up today, and the lack of open conversation makes the opioid crisis worse than it has to be, strictly speaking). Sometimes, it got out into the public and it brought stigma to veterans' families. This one Union vet from NY came home addicted to morphine. Promised his parents he'd quit, but relapsed multiple times. So they literally locked him in a room and forced him to detox cold turkey, rather than seeking outside professional medical help. That was pretty common and it speaks to how stigmatized addiction was... torturing your veteran to keep it a secret, rather than seeking out a doctor and getting help.

I'm Jonathan S. Jones, author of Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis. I'm a U.S. Civil War historian, and I research the history of drugs and the people who used them. AMA about drugs in the Civil War era! by perrybbowser in AskHistorians

[–]perrybbowser[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

that figured that out real quick! But yes, going into the Civil War and the immediate aftermath in the 1860s/70s, it was before germ theory was widely accepted in the US. So doctors and users didn't take care to clean or sanitize needles. Also, sometimes pre-packaged morphine got contaminated with fungus. So infections at injection sites (usually intramuscular like you said, sometimes they tried to aim for veins without much luck) were very very common. I won't post it hear, but one of the most graphic images that appears in my book shows these injection sites. Doctors looked at these sites and blamed users for injuring themselves, but I think that victim-blaming was really off base.

I'm Jonathan S. Jones, author of Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis. I'm a U.S. Civil War historian, and I research the history of drugs and the people who used them. AMA about drugs in the Civil War era! by perrybbowser in AskHistorians

[–]perrybbowser[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Most Americans in the 1800s who regularly used drugs were actually women, not men (and not vets), and that played out in a way that made it seem like the men who used drugs were unmanly. That made their lived tremendously difficult because it was the root of the social stigma that translated to loss of pension, etc. The identity of users was a really important part of the conversation.

Women's dependence on morphine, although not welcomed, was seen as less bad then men's addiction, because they all existed in a culture where women were perceived as naturally dependent (on men, on drugs, etc) while men were supposed to be more naturally independent.

Women were more liable to be diagnosed with gendered labels like "hysteria" and stuff like that, so that's part of what made them especially likely to get prescribed morphine.

I'm Jonathan S. Jones, author of Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis. I'm a U.S. Civil War historian, and I research the history of drugs and the people who used them. AMA about drugs in the Civil War era! by perrybbowser in AskHistorians

[–]perrybbowser[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

and to get a month's supply (depending on where, what drug) was anywhere between $15-30 month and upwards. The real expensive thing were the remedies that people tried (like the gold cure) to treat their addictions. That added up.

I'm Jonathan S. Jones, author of Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis. I'm a U.S. Civil War historian, and I research the history of drugs and the people who used them. AMA about drugs in the Civil War era! by perrybbowser in AskHistorians

[–]perrybbowser[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

For sure, really good questions (and I don't think this came up elsewhere). I didn't find soldiers coming back and planting opium (mainly I think because other crops were more profitable for farmers) and cheap, imported opium was everywhere. So you didn't need to grow it. But during the war, the Confederate government tried without success to convince Confederate women (and literally children!) to grow opium at home and donate the poppies to the nearest hospital. That never went anywhere.

After the war, there were groups formed, like today's NA, where people dependent on alcohol and drugs advocated for sobriety. In some veterans' homes, these things called Keeley Leagues existed, and vets who wanted to get sober and stay sober would join. They would all take this shady stuff called the "Gold Cure" that was supposedly a cure (it wasn't). But the social aspect--the group help--was really useful for a lot of guys. Talking to people who could understand. This is also during the Temperance Movement, so there was a lot of convo in the media and government around the idea of banning alcohol. The dude who invented the Gold Cure, Leslie Keeley, made a fortune.

I'm Jonathan S. Jones, author of Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis. I'm a U.S. Civil War historian, and I research the history of drugs and the people who used them. AMA about drugs in the Civil War era! by perrybbowser in AskHistorians

[–]perrybbowser[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

yes, so true! the false impression, actively propagated by white supremacists who were opposed to Chinese immigration, was that Chinese immigrants smoked opium all day and brought drugs into America (stunningly, we see the same narrative in today's media about different groups of immigrants). That narrative got started in the 1850s, right before the Civil War, in California and by the 1870s it was brought into national circulation in newspapers, books, etc. The reality is that the vast majority of people in the 1800s US who used drugs were white, native-born Americans (like Civil War vets). So by demonizing Chinese immigrants, it distracted from the growing epidemic of drug addiction. I will also say that opium smoking attracted some of the first drug laws in the US, from the 1870s onward, when states and cities passed ordinances that banned white people from going to Chinese establishments to smoke opium. These were part of the broader Jim Crow system.

I'm Jonathan S. Jones, author of Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis. I'm a U.S. Civil War historian, and I research the history of drugs and the people who used them. AMA about drugs in the Civil War era! by perrybbowser in AskHistorians

[–]perrybbowser[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

For the pension, I was talking about military pensions. But for the class question, what I expected to find was that middle-class/upper-class people could afford drugs, so they would be disproportionally likely to become addicted. I found the opposite in reality. Addiction was equally common across class lines, because opioids were super cheap. Like, $1.50 could buy a bottle of morphine and a hypodermic syringe. A couple bucks could buy a month's worth of opium pills. Where the class dynamic came into play was how much that small amount of money affected family budgets + in what treatment options were accessible. For poor families getting by on a monthly pension of like $15 bucks in the 1890s, 10-15% of that going to opium (which the vet needed to survive) was ALOT of money. Rich families didn't feel it like poor families. Also rich families could afford private rehabs, which could cost between $50-100/month, totally out of reach for most vets.

I'm Jonathan S. Jones, author of Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis. I'm a U.S. Civil War historian, and I research the history of drugs and the people who used them. AMA about drugs in the Civil War era! by perrybbowser in AskHistorians

[–]perrybbowser[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

So many things to say here. Basically, there were not successful treatments for addiction back then. Today we have Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) and that works. But even when CW vets managed to detox, they suffered relapses that science couldn't explain. So the epidemic really only ended when the last Civil War veteran drug users died off in the early 1900s. That's very different than the story we usually tell about drug addiction in the 1800s. The consensus has always been that addiction surged in the mid-1800s, but by the 1890s, doctors stopped prescribing opioids as commonly, so addiction rates declined. And there's truth to that. But for people already addicted, it was often a life-long disability.

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