The words I chose were “opium” and “cocaine”. I chose those words because addiction was very prevalent in the 19th Century. People didn’t actually know how the human body worked at that time, and that you could actually become addicted to substances. Their lack of education led to open and widespread use of drugs.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, opium is “A reddish-brown strongly scented addictive drug prepared from the thickened dried latex of the unripe capsules of the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum, used illicitly as a narcotic, and occasionally medicinally as a sedative and analgesic.” From our readings in class, I discovered what opium dens were – they were these meeting places, basically living rooms where a bunch of people took the drug together, and would get uncontrollably high and even pass out there for a few days. The dictionary also found that the word started being used in 1398, but the first English use or citation of the word was in 1615: G. Sandys Relation of Journey 66: The Turkes are also incredible takers of Opium. I think the quote from this could relate to the empire that Britain would become. One website, victorianweb.com, states that “By 1830, the British had become the major drug-traffickers in the world.” This word contains several drops and rises, but its highest peak was late 1870’s. I believe this has to do with the Opium Act of 1878,which “strengthened the role of opium as a cornerstone of the British imperial economic policy in the Far East.”

Cocaine is defined by oed.com as “An important alkaloid obtained from the leaves and young twigs of the coca plant, valuable as a local anæsthesiant, and also used as a stimulant.” Victorianweb.com states that cocaine was first extracted in 1860 from coca leaves by a German chemist, but that the commercial production of cocaine was delayed until the 1880’s when it became popular in the medical field. The graph reflects this because the word isn’t in use until the early 1880’s (using the English corpus – using the British English corpus didn’t make much of a difference with either words.) The dictionary’s earliest citation of the word is from 1874, from a chemistry book which explained the chemical make up of the drug and from where it derived. Another citation from 1886:  Brit. & Col. Druggist 31 July: The valuable alkaloid cocaine, whose properties as a local anæsthetic have created almost a revolution in ophthalmic and other branches of surgery. This shows how people also used this substance medically (from oed.com: 1887 Braithwaite Retrospect Med. XCV. 11 Cocaine Cotton for toothache.) Another quote from victorianweb.com verifies this: “Cocaine lozenges were recommended as effective remedies for coughs, colds and toothaches in the Victorian era. It was believed in the nineteenth century that cocaine had therapeutic effects and it was often prescribed in the treatment of indigestion, melancholia, neurasthenia. Cocaine was also used as an anesthetic.”