Opium dens

It ll be lovely to see you, said my cousin Izzy on the phone two weeks ago when, late one evening and two whiskies down, I finally decided to do it, that there was no reason to delay. When we bought the house in Narrow Street, it wasn t a Queen Anne Residence Convenient for the City it was a tenement, in a slum. You could almost smell Sherlock Holmes s opium dens, see the lascars and hear the drunken sailors. Not anymore. There s every... 

Just as smoking opium typically requires a large setup (a kit ), for many it also requires a safe haven. This need for a secret place to smoke is responsible for the creation of the opium den. 

The method of the opium den constitutes the primary process used by the majority of opium smokers throughout history, but today, smoking opium by other methods is more prevalent in the West. There are other traditional methods of smoking... 

Tosches, Nick. The Last Opium Den. New York Bloomsbury, 2002. 

Opium had long been used by the Chinese to stop diarrhea, but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, its recreational use exploded. In 1800, the Imperial government of Kia King banned its import and trade completely, but could not effectively enforce the ban. Opium dens flourished in the port cities and spread inward. 

In America, opium "dens," places where people came to smoke opium in pipes, were introduced in the West by Chinese immigrants who had been brought to this country as cheap labor to build railroads and work in gold mines. The dens played a central role in the social life of impoverished Chinese laborers. Opium smokers "hit the pipe" as often as three times a day in the dens, where they lay on couches and dreamed off the effects of the drug. 

A famous illustration of five attractive young women, exotically dressed and lying on divans, appeared in the December 2, 1876, issue of Illustrated Police News magazine. Water pipes were visible in this illustration of a "Hasheesh Hell," which may have been an example of the illicit places that arose following the banning of opium dens..22... 

Some of the old laws, such as those that closed opium dens, were enacted before much was known about how drugs affect the human body. The Harrison Narcotic Act was adopted in 1914 amid fears of violence from drug-addicted minorities and criminals. It was meant to regulate the sale of opium and cocaine, but the legislation ultimately banned most mind drugs for all but medical use. 

A Chinese-American opium den (by artist Winslow Homer) as depicted in Harper s, 1874... 

An elegant opium den in Hankou, China, about 1900. (Courtesy of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology)... 

Four sprawl in darkened room Opium den of purest dreams... 

F The San Francisco Ordinance banned opium dens but not the actual smoking of opium. 

The growing spectre of the opium den in the Chinatowns of many of the nation s cities kindled the resentment of many Americans toward what they regarded as a backwards race of degenerates. An editorial in the February 13, 1882, edition of the Tombstone Epitaph did not mince its bigotry ... 

Figure 1. An opium den in London s East End with a reclining smoker being watched by a group of men. Engraving by A. Dorns after G. Dove. Wellcome Institute Library, London.

Figure 1 shows a late Victorian engraving of an "opium den" in London s East End. This was a popular stereotypical image of the period and part of the myth created by popular novehsts such as Conan Doyle that was also encouraged by the anti-opium movement in England at the time, also anti-immigrant hostility. 

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