Opiate addiction, morality and medicine: from moral illness to pathological disease

In this slender volume, Dr Harding has set himself the task of explaining how a moral condemnation ofopium use arose in Britain in the latter halfofthe nineteenth century, only to be supplanted by a medical concept of drug addiction as a pathological disease. He claims that he has diverged from "conventional histories" and, guided methodologically by Michel Foucault, has "tried to describe the social relations which made possible these descriptions and the way in which they have been taken seriously" (p. 85). The change from a moral to a medical view of opium use in an interesting and topical subject. Despite two recent books that cover much of the same ground, there is ample room to see the phenomenon from a new perspective. Unfortunately, Dr Harding's book does not do so. On the one hand, the book is filled with errors, omissions, and misjudgements. On the other hand, some of the book's most critical chapters are simply borrowed, acknowledged or unacknowledged, from existing literature. Dr Harding argues that the moral perspective on opium use was shaped during the last decades of the nineteenth century, largely through the efforts of the Quaker-dominated Society for the Suppression of the Opium Traffic. The Quakers were successful in defining and holding to their opposition to opium because they believed unequivocally that the drug "pathologically debilitated the moral faculty" of those who smoked it. Yet there was a considerable opposition to this view, culminating in the 1895 Indian Opium Report, a highly-publicized exoneration of opium by some of Britain's most respected medical men and colonial officials. Dr Harding has exaggerated the influence of the SSOT by omitting any reference to this considerable body of dissent. In his discussion of the passage of the 1906 parliamentary resolution that effectively ended the Indo-Chinese opium trade, Dr Harding fails to mention the substantial role of the Liberal Party. His overly-complex explanation for the changed perception of narcotic drugs in literature rests, implausibly, on an entirely atypical (and bad) novel by Aleister Crowley, The diary of drug fiend (1922). Finally, although Dr Harding claims to be inspired by Michel Foucault's methodology, Foucault is not mentioned until the end of the book, and then only in passing. Whatever methodological contribution Foucault's work may have made is not at all clear. Much of Dr Harding's book is borrowed from other historians. His chapter on 'Opium and the British' is drawn almost …