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Elizabeth Kelly Gray, Habit Forming: Drug Addiction in America, 1776-1914

New York, Oxford University Press, 2022, 352 pages
Adrien Lievin
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Elizabeth Kelly Gray, Habit Forming: Drug Addiction in America, 1776-1914

New York, Oxford University Press, 2022, 352 pages

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1In 1869, Dr. Henry Gibbons, a prominent California medical practitioner and editor, praised morphine for its ability to make pains "vanish as if by magic" (p. 172). Like many of his fellow colleagues who prescribed and advised the use of such substances that later became classified as narcotics, he was responsible for the skyrocketing number of American narcotic addiction that peaked in the mid-1890s, reaching an estimated 313,177 users (p. 171).

2In Habit Forming: Drug Addiction in America, 1776-1914, Elizabeth Kelly Gray tells the tragic yet revelatory love-hate story between Americans and narcotics, from the country’s Revolution to the 1914 Harrison Narcotics Act, the first federal measure aimed at restricting public access to cocaine and opiates. While other scholarship on that topic has primarily focused on the late 19th century onwards—when debates over domestic American drug use and addiction became public and flooded mainstream media—Gray’s account extends the scope to include addicts—or habitués—whose profiles and life experiences had a decisive impact on the debate over the regulation and toleration of narcotics. In addition to medical and pleasure-seeking users, whose drug habits have already been thoroughly documented, Gray sheds new light on white middle-class habitual users, who used substances to help relax and unwind after a tenuous day at work, and endure adversity and social expectations (p. 3).

3Focusing on gender, class and race in an international global context, Gray shows that America long denied the existence of drug addiction on its shores, considering addiction a problem foreign from the white Protestant community. Popular exotic travel tales depicting racialized local users as lazy, emasculate, and unproductive helped forge the image of the habitué as a social parasite prone to violence and vice. While American readers were entertained by stories about hashish and opium consumption in the Middle East and Asia, they were quite shocked to learn that Thomas De Quincey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were addicted to opiates and narcotics. Addiction was not a phenomenon endemic to exotic and faraway nations that affected lower, non-white, unrespectable classes; it transcended social and economic categories, and spared no one.

4Gray argues that women were the first domestic victims of narcotic habituation. Often falling prey to diagnoses and misdiagnoses of diseases considered "women’s illnesses," physicians treated their female patients with recently discovered drugs, which contributed to rendering them addicted to the very substances that were supposed to free them from their ills. Female users, as well as regular upper-class and middle-class habitués who used narcotics as a restorative, were mostly pitied by the medical field and the American public at large, who considered them to be the victims of industrialization and modernity. Contrariwise, such use by racial minorities was frowned upon and criticized. Gray argues that it was the changing profile of the habitué which compelled the federal government to take a firm hand on drug control and regulation. Thanks to improvements and innovations in the pharmaceutical industry, the fatigued middle class turned to newly-designed addiction-free substances (such as aspirin) to alleviate their ills. The typical habitué was no longer a respectable member of the well-to-do classes who used drugs not for their restorative virtues. Habituation became gradually associated with low-life, despicable pleasure-seeking junkies, who had only themselves to blame for their decay.

  • 1 In 1840, opium importation valued just under $41,000; by 1865 it had reached more than $932,000. Be (...)

5Habit Forming is organized in nine chronological chapters divided into three main parts. The first part covers drug use in early America, from 1776 to the late 1860s, before drug habituation received significant attention in the popular press—and when shame and social etiquette led addicts to hide their habituation. By offering a thorough analysis of drug addiction prior to the 1870s, Gray fills a historiographical gap. Her research work on newspapers, periodicals, letters and diaries before 1867 provides a refreshingly new history of addiction. At the time, opium was used as a sleep aid and painkiller, and even mothers and nurses treated infants and children with opiate-based medication. It was also used to provide comfort at the end of life and treat animal diseases. This made opiates the home remedy in most American households, with its use skyrocketing between 1842 and 1877.1 While the Civil War partly accounted for the increase in opiate use, Gray primarily blames physicians’ lack of knowledge and advocacy for such substances. She also argues that the temperance movement led severe alcoholics to turn to opiates. A short chapter focuses on cannabis – the typical ingredient of many exotic travel accounts. However, up to the late 1860s and even later, cannabis consumption never matched that of opiates.

6The second part of the book focuses on the global context. More specifically it shows how foreign accounts of consumption and diplomatic ventures – such as the Opium Wars in China – influenced America’s societal views on drugs and habitués. Disastrous military failures and even the downfall of the once-glorious Chinese civilization were blamed on opium consumption: "to Americans, China was the quintessential example of how extensive drug abuse could ravage a nation" (p. 127). The third part covers the years 1867 to 1914, when domestic drug addiction became a much-contested debate that split the medical and political fields. This final section includes analyses of the arrival of heroin and cocaine on the medical market and its association with African Americans in white Americans’ psyche. Gray’s discussion of peyote and marijuana, respectively associated with Native Americans and Mexicans in the public mind, further reveals the type of systemic racism that catalyzed federal action against drug use.

7Habit Forming is an addictive read that keeps the reader hooked to the various destinies of habitués whose life stories and experiences support Gray’s argument. While it is accessible to a wide audience, it will primarily appeal to students and scholars interested in the history of drug use and enforcement in the United States, as well as in scientific and psychological terminologies and theories of addiction. A crucial contribution to the fields of history and medical sciences, Habit Forming also offers a compelling portrayal of average people whose voices and experiences inform our understanding of the cultural and social dimension of addiction. Some of their life stories are heartbreaking, others inspiring, but they all contribute to strengthening Gray’s arguments. The discrete presence of minorities, including women, who represented most of the victims of addiction in the nineteenth century, points to the archival silence surrounding members of marginalized communities in the American society. Owing to the impact of exposure journalism and the advent of photography as a source of documentary evidence of white Americans’ drug habits (p. 157)—not to mention the proliferation of ads produced by charlatans and fake doctors (p. 185)—the choice not to reproduce more pictorial archival evidence may seem surprising. Yet, as the image of a man covered in abscesses and scars caused by needle injections reproduced p. 178 demonstrates, a picture is worth a thousand words. Despite these minor imperfections, Habit Forming provides exemplary scholarship on the societal struggles surrounding drug use in the United States prior to federal intervention.

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Notes

1 In 1840, opium importation valued just under $41,000; by 1865 it had reached more than $932,000. Between 1867 and 1877, while the population only grew by 10%, heroin importation increased by 70% (see p. 3 and p. 171).

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Adrien Lievin, « Elizabeth Kelly Gray, Habit Forming: Drug Addiction in America, 1776-1914 »IdeAs [En ligne], 23 | 2024, mis en ligne le 01 février 2024, consulté le 13 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ideas/17417 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ideas.17417

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Adrien Lievin

Adrien Lievin est doctorant en civilisation américaine à l’Université de Lille et au Centre d'Études en Civilisations, Langues et Lettres Étrangères (CECILLE ULR 4074).
adrien.lievin[at]univ-lille.fr

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