The use of narcotics was very common in Victorian England, especially opium. There was no such thing as a drug policy. George Orwell's father, had been in charge of quality control in the Opium Department. Children were often doped to put them to sleep.
They took opium for a variety of reasons. It was sometimes taken to suppress hunger pains or some other ailment like toothache. Some people like the writer Thomas De Quincey, ate opium and he wrote a book called 'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater'. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, also took opium.
It was often taken as laudanum, a mixture of opium
and alcohol, which was taken to treat diarrhoea and other symptoms. With the
invention of the hypodermic needle in the 1840s, some people started to take
morphine and heroin. They also took cannabis, coca and mescal. Of all the
drugs, alcohol was probably the most popular.
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