laudanum is a tincture of opium, that is, an extract of opium made by dissolving it in alcohol. Its principal uses are medicinal, but the concoction was also consumed with recreational abandon by a variety of people in the nineteenth century, most famously the English Romantic writers Thomas de Quincey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
The word “laudanum” was first used by the Swiss-German alchemist Paracelsus in the sixteenth century, although it is unclear whether the formula at the time contained opium. The London physician Thomas Sydenham likely made the first recognizable tincture in the 1660s; his recipe is as follows: “One pint of sherry wine, two ounces of good quality Indian or Egyptian opium, one of saffron, a cinnamon stick and a clove, both powdered. Mix and simmer over a vapor bath for two or three days.” Later recipes simplified this considerably, macerating the opium in boiling water before adding alcohol. And despite Sydenham’s recipe, opium was mostly sourced from Turkey and India. In the latter part of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, laudanum production and sale proliferated around Europe and North America in the form of a bewildering variety of cordials and preparations to which everything from licorice to pearls to henbane were added. See cordials. (Paregoric, a milder, camphorated tincture of opium, is probably the most famous of these mixtures.) It was sold to the poor and royalty alike, and given to adults and children alike too. Praised as a panacea, it also killed people if taken in too high a dose. Famous public figures from Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Johnson to Pope Pius VII extolled its virtues.
Apparently the taste was rather bitter. Dosage was measured by the drop, but in the hands of those excessively familiar with it, drops could become glasses. Evidently there was a blurry area between medicinal and recreational use of laudanum. There was also the matter of its addictive potential; however, until the mid-nineteenth century, these issues were little commented on. It was Thomas De Quincey, in his Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822), who gleefully extolled the wonders of a decanter of “ruby red” laudanum, drunk by the wine glass, “warm, and without sugar,” with a book of German metaphysics on the table in his Lake Country cottage. He was not alone: Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Balzac, Baudelaire, Thoreau, Poe, and Novalis all noted the dreamy powers of the beverage. In the process, recreational drug use with its associations of art and youth culture was born.
Although many in the nineteenth century were first exposed to laudanum for medical reasons, and the chemist/druggist shop was likely to be the place of purchase, laudanum was also for sale in grocery stores and via booksellers and traveling peddlers. We are told that in the English Fenlands it was mixed with beer, sometimes by the brewer himself. Nonetheless, its explicit use as an intoxicant was apparently rare—gin remaining considerably cheaper.
The first laws regulating the use of psychoactive substances (the 1868 Poisons and Pharmacy Act in the United Kingdom; the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914 in the United States) came into being in part because of the excessive unregulated sale and use of opiate-based tonics and beverages such as laudanum. The late nineteenth-century Orientalist vogue for opium smoking, the invention of the hypodermic syringe, and the production of increasingly strong opiates such as morphine and heroin also played a role in the end of the age of the opium drinker. Nonetheless, laudanum is still available by prescription.
Today the ambiguous place of laudanum as a tipple has been taken over by codeine-cough-syrup-based beverages such as purple drank (also known as lean, sizzurp, and Texas tea), a cocktail of codeine and promethazine, mixed with soft drinks such as Sprite and ice cubes, served in a Styrofoam cup, first popularized by hip-hop artists in Houston, Texas, in the early 1990s.
gin and health and spirits.Booth, Martin. Opium: A History. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998.
De Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1971.
Dormandy, Thomas. Opium: Reality’s Dark Dream. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012.
By: Marcus Boon