cuts in the pod there. and you can see the cuts coming down. and this milky liquid oozes out. and that's what's collected. and that has the active opiate in it. then these are two lithographs commissioned by a military man in 1850 in beng bengal, india where the british produced a tremendous amount of opium. once they had the milky liquid from the opium they would put it in these -- and they gathered immense quantities of it. so they would put it into these tubs here and stir it about and

do various things to it until it congealed and got more solid. then they would form them into balls of opium. this example on the upper right there. it's apparently about the size of a child's head. so these are enormous balls of opium. and you can see from the photo down here when they just produced or the lithograph, they produced a tremendous amount of it. and then it could be in this form, in the form of the balls of opium. it was very easy to transport. it was reasonably preservable so that it wouldn't degrade or decay or anything like that. it could be then sold to consumers, to pharmaceutical companies, presumably you could just eat the opium and get the benefit that way, or it could be used to make preparations like

laudanum, paregoric or morphine. and it's sort of an opium factory in india. so there's a -- britain particularly had a huge financial investment in the opium trade, as we'll see, and that becomes important later on. >> what is the boy doing in the one image? >> right here? >> yes. >> i think he's just waiting in the vats for more opium so that he'll probably be stirring it. that was the -- you can see further in the back, that seems to be what they're doing. any other questions? jump right in if you have them. okay. and again, just some images for laudanum. a lot of different companies

produced it. you would by it in bottles of various sizes and shapes. later on, toward the turn of the century, companies were much better about marking it as poison. if you drink too much of this you're going to die. so earlier on they probably were not as scrupulous as that. but the skull and cross bones. and as you can see, it came in different shapes and forms. here's an interesting cartoon about the extent of laudanum use and abuse. the legend is "i'll write you a precipitation of laudanum for your bad knee, mrs. aldridge. and for your bad knee i'll write a prescription for laudanum. and for your insomnia i'll write a prescription for laudanum until i see you next." for whatever ailed you you would get a prescription for laudanum. with all opiates it's addictive. this could be over a couple of months or even a shorter duration than that, if you take it regularly it's going to be hard to stop taking it. and remember this cartoon.

because it's significant in a number of ways. and we'll come back to that later on. this is one of the interesting things. it's a label for a bottle of laudanum produced by writer brothers drug company somewhere in utah. but what i found was interesting -- and again it's 48% alcohol so it's 96 proof. so even if you were just drinking it without the opium it would have a kick to it. look at the antidote. strong emetic or stomach pump, i got that. dash cold water in the face. keep in motion. artificial expiration. galvanic battery. this must have been before we were quite as litigious a society as we are now. before torts became so important. because you think you'd want a

little bit more guidance on exactly what you were going to do with a galvanic battery as you have this person sort of nodding off from an overdose of opium. so again, there's laudanum. and we think today of heroin as this illicit drug. but for the first part of -- first ten years or so or longer really of its existence, it was a commercial pharmaceutical. heroin was a trade name, a brand name. and you can see here, this is an ad for bayer pharmaceutical. and heroin the sedative for coughs along with a bunch of other -- for aspirin, for example, and other stuff that they manufactured. so it was not uncommon for heroin to be a constituent part of a lot of the medicines that they put out. and here's another one, another example. phrase frazier's tablets,

heroin, chloride, belladonna in it. so these must have had a kick not only in terms of making you feel good but affecting your heart rate and so on and so forth. this is an ad from the new york medical journal, which is a mainstream thing. so it was not like heroin was this illicit, under the table kind of good at this point. and i do i have actually a couple of things i can pass around to show you. i bought this online. and it was described as a sideshow gaffe. so i think it's meant for like a carnival or something. so the bottles, i think, are originals but the labels are reproductions. it's not a real syringe and there's not real heroin in the

bottle so don't get excited. but it will give you an idea of -- you would go into a store and buy a bottle of laudanum, which was not uncommon. so you can pass that around and take a look at it. another ad for heroin, bayer pharmaceutical product, heroin hydro chloride is pre-eminently adapted for the manufacture of cough c elixir s, 4.85 per ounce. the cheapest specific for the relief of coughs, bronchitis, physisis. you know what that is? whooping cough. you could buy this just about anywhere. drug companies would sell it. certainly by wholesale you'd

having to a druggist or a pharmacist to buy it in large quantities but it was not illegal, at least in the first few years. as i said before, one of the interesting things about heroin initially is that they did not recognize that it was addicting. they didn't recognize that it was in fact more powerful than morphine. and so this is an interesting ad. and i actually have the original of this ad. i'll pass it around. it's for sheflin's elixir of heroin with turpinhydrate. diseases of the respiratory organ, and irritation of mucous membrane. but if you go to the bottom, sheflin's elixir of heroin has proved efficient as an analgesic and sedative in painful diseases neuralgias, and in the cure of the morphine habit. this preparation has also been employed with much success.

so if you were trying to kick morphine they would give you heroin. which, yeah, that's kind of like giving you a quart of ever clear as an antidote for alcoholism. it's probably not going to work. but i'll pass this around and take a look at it on the other side is another ad for predigested beef. which i'm not sure what you would use that for. >> so we've got that. and this is interesting. we'll talk more in a couple of weeks about the beginnings of narcotic control and legislation in the early 20th century. and the passage of the harrison anti-narcotic act in 1914. one of the things that it did was mandate -- it didn't outlaw opiates or outlaw the sal sale or use of opiates. what it did mandate was careful

records had to be kept and send to the internal revenue service. and this was one of the forms that you would have used if you were buying -- if you were a drug company or a pharmacist. >> did this benefit physicians when it was enacted? >> no, actually they were opposed to it for reasons that we'll talk about later on, largely. >> was this taking place -- did the temperance movement have anything to do with this? >> not per se. many of the people who were anti-drugs were also anti-alcohol and were anti-tobacco and various things like that. but for most of the 19th century, these were considered

two different things. addiction to alcohol or intemperance or whatever you want to call it was considered a sort of a separate animal from addiction to opiates or other drugs. they converged toward the end of the century and the early 20th century and diverged again in terms of how you treat them, how you approach them. but no, the people who were working for prohibition of alcohol, for example, were largely a different group. although they might have been sympathetic. but it was largely a different group. >> what about in the case of laudanum because of the high alcohol content? were temperance organizations against laudanum? >> i haven't come across that. probably they would have been against its use, what we would think of as recreationally or non-medicinally. and they were certainly against the use of alcohol medicinally. but for something like that, the alcohol was more of a solvent than anything else.

i think they would have been okay with laudanum administered by a physician, or at least some of them would have. the thing that interested me about this, and this is actual lit background of this thing, is that if you look at the -- he's buying a pint of heroin, which is kind of interesting. a pint of liquid heroin. and there was a point in which you could do that. entirely legal as long as you put it on the right form and you were a pharmacist. this was probably before the more convenient travel-size half-pint heroin bottles came out. but it's kind of jarring. i mean, when you think about heroin today and it's sort of an

unmitigated evil. and to think that, well, they were selling pints of it on the open market entirely legally. and this was what, 1915. so it would have been a year after the harrison act was passed. >> you could also get the predigested beef in pint bottles. [ laughter ] >> yeah. right. it would be interesting to know what that was for. so again, at the beginning of the 20th century -- okay. if you guys would raise your hand so he knows where to take the mike there. at the beginning of the 20th century it's a completely different context and situation than we had today. there were a lot of very powerful narcotics commonly available, if not commonly

available to consumers through prescription, and even after the passage of the harrison act, for a while until -- well, we'll talk about that later. so the other major form of opium use was smoking opium. and this was something of a different animal than the other forms, than laudanum, paregoric, morphine or heroin. british importation of indian-grown opium, because the british colonized india in the early part of the 19th century certainly. they were told the opium that they grew in india. -- much of the chinese population was addicted to smoking opium.

but it was a tremendous percentage of the population. when in the later 19th century chinese immigrants began coming to the united states primarily to the west coast during the gold rush, later to work on the railroads, they brought the practice of smoking opium with them to the u.s. this was viewed, as we'll see by white america, as a foreign vice that threatens to corrupt american morality. it was centered on the west coast at first and then spread outward with chinese immigrants to places like new york, philadelphia, anywhere there was a relatively large chinese immigrant population. and there was also some use by the -- among the native-born

american population, among the upper classes and some of the criminal elements as well. which was also worrying along with this alien -- seemingly alien substance. so by the 1870s, 1880s there, were a number of concerns about opium smoking in america. not just that there was now a growing population of chinese immigrants who were doing it, but also the fear that it would spread to the white population. these were two illustrations from popular magazines. the one on the right, on your right, is i believe from harper's. and the interesting about it is, anybody want to guess who the artist was who did this one over here or the chinese opium den? >> [ inaudible ] >> no. good guess. not thomas ness. anybody else? interestingly enough, winslow homer. scenes of seascapes and scenes of sort of country life. but i guess he had to make a living, too, so he did this

scene of an opium den here. on the left you see another one from the 1870s. and what's interesting about this one is, it seems that there's a group of tourists on the left-hand side who are being conducted through this opium den by way of saying, here are the degenerates. you can watch them smoke. we'll explain things to you and everything. and the practice of slumming originates in the 1840s as people go through the five points district in new york. and the idea of being wealthy people are going to the slums to see how the other half lives. and this seems to be another incident of that.

>> is that guy at the bottom sneering at the tourists on the left side of the picture? >> he may well be. this would have been staged. even if this is not just fabricated from the artist's imagination, clearly if you were planning on bringing tourists through you were going to have people who looked like chinese opium smokers to meet their expectations. so yeah, that may have come out somewhat in the lithograph as well. >> this idea of slumming, it's kind of reminding me of the french figure of the fleneur. is there a similarity between these two? because the fleneur as i understood him is a solitary, upper middle class figure. and is the slumming done in groups or is it done individually? >> it would have been done in groups, largely speaking. if you were doing it alone chances you were not slumming, you were probably going there to

actually smoke, which was an entirely different thing. and that's what folks were worried about would happen. >> in i think it's in "dark paradise" cartwright actually says that opium smoking almost had to be a group thing, that you learned it from somebody who was more experienced. you learned the ups and downs of it. he said if it would have been a thing you did on your own it would have died out in a generation. >> yes. at least the act of smoking, both apparently in the chinese community and in the euro-american community was a very social thing that you had to -- there was an elaborate ritual to preparing the opium and then putting it in a pipe and then smoking it. and i recall in "dark paradise"

he said even if you had a wonderful kit, in other words a really ornate pipe and wonderful opium and all that stuff. if you were doing it alone it probably wasn't any fun, wasn't satisfying. that the social aspect of other people doing it was integral to the experience. >> on the picture on the right there's two doorways. there's people on the left and on the right. is there supposed to be a comparison or contrast to those individuals? >> well, that's a good question. >> because it looks like the people on the right are like in a little meeting or something. people at the left -- >> there and there, yeah. >> have more of an evil look. >> well, i think the people on the left are probably the chinese workers coming out to bring more opium. it's a chinese opium den. people on the right, maybe that's a separate meeting hall. because they would keep the rooms divided up into various small rooms for small groups to use. >> sure.

so i think those guys are probably just bringing they're them more opium or something. >> and interestingly, and cartwright does mention this in the book, but it's really interesting fact of where language comes from. if somebody says, well, you're hip, that means you're cool and you're with it and everything. and that the notion of a hipster comes from opium smoking. because if you notice, they're all laying on their hips. and so that's where a hipster originally was an opium smoker. slang for that. so interestingly enough. then opium dens in america were getting to the period now where we have photographs of things as opposed to just lithographs. here i couldn't fit all of it on

screen and it didn't seem to matter. the one at the top here, the yellowish one, there were actually two of these and it was part of a stereoscope, one of the those things you put in and you look through it and it looks 3d. so this is an opium den in new york city. and again, it may have been posed. but probably represents largely what it would have looked like even if it was posed for the picture. these two, i believe, are in san francisco. and again you see the guys laying on their hip. here this looked largely respectable, euro-americans who are in the store smoking with the chinese man. and here as well. more of a clandestine opium den. what do you notice about these pictures? joe? >> the mix of white and asians? >> a mix of white and asian. what else. maria? >> there's women? >> yes, there are women. which is quite interesting. i mean, in part it's because of

the social nature of this. >> i was just kind of going by what joe had mentioned. are some of these opium dens, did they try to keep chinese and americans separate? because they had talked about mingling. because the americans didn't want to be associated with chinese that were smoking opium. so how were those dens set up early? >> i think probably early on they would have been racially integrated simply because at first you would have to go where the opium was. probably as they developed and spread to larger cities and began to cater to specific clienteles, the middle class, the upper class, there would have been more selectivity and

segregation. i think that's -- when we get to the discussion of the document, i think that's one of the things that it says that this was largely a white opium den kind of thing. >> another way to consider it is the three chinese you see in these throw pictures are probably facilitating the opium smoking. so in a sense it's like who goes to a chinese restaurant where a bunch of say mexicans work there or whatever, which is kind of odd. most people associate chinese food with chinese waiters and chinese cooks and so on. so i'm wondering if that's simply part of that brand name. you go to an opium den. >> part of the atmosphere. >> part of the atmosphere is being served by someone who's chinese. >> again, yeah, you had to meet the expectations of your clientele. frank. >> early on, cartwright makes a note that it seemed like women made up at least as many or more than the number of men in these

opium houses and for the people who smoked. i don't remember whether or not he addressed why that was. >> not so much smoking, but we'll talk more about that later, about women's use of opium. i think the smoking opium was primarily men early on. because the chinese population was mostly men early on. and certainly if you were a woman you probably couldn't go to these places alone unless you were really abandoned, a loose woman. but it is -- yes. >> i was about to make a point about how it seems like the picture on the left seems like a really large i guess almost large family room. and i could see there's like a pantry and everything. but the other two pictures, they seem like really small, really cramped rooms. and the bottom right one especially looks like it's just part of a hallway with two bed with little curtains and everything. so i just don't know if that's how they were divided up. >> i think it probably reflects that there were different sorts of establishments for different sorts of purposes and different sorts of clientele. but it is significant, i think, and interesting that women appear in these pictures. because this is one of the major anxieties that americans had about opium, not just that the white population would begin to smoke it or use it and sort of

be drawn into this foreign vice but that there was a particular danger to women being seduced and drugged and taken advantage of and white slavery and this kind of thing. so smoking opium and the threat to american women was sort of a light motif that ran through a lot of this material.

you can see in these two pictures, this is the -- this seems to be the major focus of this, these sort of abandoned women who were so drugged out that they really don't know what's going on. and who knows what they'll do to get the drug or what will be done to them while they're incapacitated and so on. and there's a large -- you mentioned france before, but toward the end of the century there's a lot of illustrations in france sort of linking eroticism and women smoking opium. americans were a little bit prudish. the thinking you don't want this to happen. but there was a way in which you could traffic on these images. and this is a very interesting one. i found this on a web site devoted to chinese american history. and their take on this was that this was a completely fabricated picture. it's dated 1892. white women in opium den, chinatown, san francisco. and apparently the woman at the bottom here, who's on her back, apparently this is an impossible angle to smoke an opium pipe from. so this is not a realistic position to be doing that. they also speculate that the

necessary chinese person in here is not in fact chinese but rather is african-american who is dressed up to look chinese for the purpose of taking this picture. so again there are all sorts of stereotypes here. and if you wanted to sell lithographs and pictures you would pick themes that people were interested in or were sort of notorious. >> you can see a little bit of his hair peeking out from the wig. >> yes. so this does seem to be a costume piece. >> when was this picture taken? >> it's dated may 31st, 1892.

>> okay. >> the roaring 90s. the gay 90s. >> like why would you want -- who are these appealing to? >> well, people, middle class folks bought a lot of images. i mean, of really weird stuff. who bought the images of african-americans who were lynched? i mean, who bought those, too? so there was a market for -- i mean keep in mind, they didn't have cameras. they didn't have television. they didn't have movies. so you might in fact buy these images. >> well, to go into this idea of who would buy the images, a lot of the orientalist photography that was done that was staged in the middle east of supposedly being inside the hair harems but actually just prostitutes who were paid a little money to pretend they were in the harem. so the same sort of market, i suppose. >> exactly. >> could this be a piece of propaganda? i mean, at this point in the 1890s was there an anti-opium movement yet? >> an anti-opium movement and anti-chinese movement. >> could this be a piece of fear mongering, not just who's buying it but who's buying into it?