VANCOUVER'S OPIUM HISTORY TELLS OF FASHION, DRUGS AND MONEY

Wealthy women joined working people and the down-and-out in their addiction
to a drug some considered medicine

Barbra Hodgson's morphine case is made of silver. Streamlined and slimmer
than your little finger, it would easily fit into the daintiest palm.

Inside, lined up like filter-tipped Rothmans in a cigarette case, are thin
glass vials, capped with cork stoppers. There is also a cute little glass
syringe the size of an eyedropper and a space to hold a reusable hypodermic
needle.

The case dates back to the early years of the 20th century, when
fashionable women would take their morphine and needles with them for a
night on the town.

"You could be quite respectable carrying around one of these," Hodgson
says, opening the shiny silver case. "They were sold in jewellery stores
and engraved...They could take them to the opera or the theatre and" - she
pauses, grins - "shoot up."

Hodgson, a Vancouver writer and book designer, pulls out a 1908 article
from the San Francisco Examiner illustrated with a drawing of a
dreamy-looking woman with opera glasses and feathered hat.

"Has It Come to This?" the headline screams.

"During the Christmas shopping season some persons were amazed and shocked
to discover, among the gifts offered for sale in the best jewellery houses
in New York, gold, jeweled morphine sets. Apparently they were intended
for women...

"Rich and fashionable women now receive at this sacred Christmas season
congratulatory gifts which mark their enslavement to one of the most
degrading and ruinous of vices."

Hodgson, the author of Opium: A Portrait of the Heavenly Demon, will be
talking about the history of the drug and its derivatives at a Heritage
Vancouver lecture Wednesday at 8 p.m. at the Vancouver Museum. It's part
of a series of talks that will look at this city's experience with topics
including beer, prostitution and night clubs.

In Vancouver as elsewhere, opium, morphine and heroin were not confined to
the opium dens of Chinatown and similar lower-class hangouts, Hodgson says.

Opium was made illegal shortly before the First World War, but for many
years after that, you could buy various medicinal mixtures containing the
drug. Hodgson has a vast collection of empty bottles, receipts and
prescriptions to prove it.

She has a bottle that carried Dr. Pierce's Favorite Prescription, which
contained opium and alcohol, and another for Piso's Cure for Consumption a
highly popular tuberculosis "cure" containing opium, alcohol and cannabis.
She has a bottle that was once filled with Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup,
an alcohol-and-morphine-sulphate combination that ended babies' teething
complaints.

She has tins that once contained morphine-laden cough drops, like Lynox
Throat Pastilles and Gee's Linctus Pastilles.

And she has a bottle for Dr. J. Collis Browne's Chlorodyne "for coughs,
colds, consumption," the label of which advises discreetly that the
authorities classified its contents as poison.

Hodgson started collecting her opium memorabilia after a trip to a flea
market turned up an old postcard of an opium den, showing a group of
Chinese men lying on mattresses and puffing on pipes.

She was intrigued that a tourist would buy such a card and send it off to a
friend or relative: "Having a great time. Wish you were here."

But for many years, Hodgson says, opium was a common product in Vancouver.
She has a receipt from Kwong On Lung wholesalers on Store Street in
Victoria, detailing the purchases of a Mrs. Tai Chong in February and March
1885:

During those two months, Mrs. Chong - who apparently ran a grocery store -
purchased "opium, salted turnip, opium, China rice, opium, salted bamboo
shoot" to a total of $3,436.88.

In the 1880's, raw opium came to Victoria from China and was processed into
a smokable product in one of a dozen factories. The Kwong On Lung company
which sold Mrs. Chong her opium and turnips, operated one of those factories.

Once opium was made illegal police on the West Coast began shutting down
the opium dens. In 1915, Vancouver police arrested 301 men for the offence
of being found in an opium joint.

At a time when middle-class folks could buy tincture of heroin at the local
Owl Drugs, the Vancouver press played up the war on opium smokers with
headlines like "Prisoner in a Local Opium Den."

By the 1920s, almost all the dens had been closed.

Vancouver's opium business attracted the attention of the U.S. press.
American newspapers in the early part of the century carried stories about
the "desperate outlaws" who smuggled opium out of the tiny coves and
harbours of southwest B.C.

The opium smugglers also dealt in Chinese migrants Hodgson notes: "Things
don't change."

In 1923, Vancouver featured as the setting of Woman with a Poppy, a story
in the lurid American magazine Argosy.

In the story, an innocent young woman comes to Vancouver and gets pulled
into the devilish world of opium smuggling and smoking.

Vancouver, says Hodgson, "was considered a pretty vice-ridden place."