Cecil’s answer covers the morphine given to soldiers during the Civil War, but what were the numbers of women who were addicted to Laudanum?
I doubt it could be determined.
Laudanum was sold OTC, and could be had freely.
BTW-- a link to your article would be nice.
Er, ah:
I have an excellent book on my shelf called Dark Paradise: Opium Addiction in America before 1940, by David T. Courtwright. It doesn’t give exact numbers, but the percentage was high:
**The outstanding feature of nineteenth-century opium and morphine addiction is that the majority of addicts were women. Orville Marshall’s 1878 Michigan survey, Charles Earle’s 1880 Chicago survey, and Justin Hull’s 1885 Iowa survey indicated that 61.2, 71.9, and 63.4 percent of their respective samples were female. Marshall further differentiated between opium addicts, of whom 56.3 percent were female, and morphine addicts, of whom 65.6 percent were female. The location with the highest percentage of female addicts allegedly was Albany, where it was reported that “fully four-fifths of the opium-eaters are women.”
The disproportionate number of female opium and morphine addicts persisted in some places well into the twentieth century. In 1912 Charles Terry reported that 68.2 percent of Jacksonville’s opium and morphine addicts were female; in spite of an influx of male transients, the figure at the end of 1913 was still 61.0 percent female. Tennessee’s 1913 registration and maintenance program revealed that 66.9 percent of morphine users, 75.0 percent of laudanum users, and 66.7 percent of gum opium users were female; in contrast, women comprised only 22.6 percent of the registered heroin users. As late as 1919 a report from Memphis indicated that 57.0 percent of the morphine addicts in that city were female.**
So?
Arent the majority of drug addicts mostly women?
Both now, and in the past – remember Mick Jagger singing about Mother’s little helper?
I never thought of Mick Jagger as a social statistician. From where do you extract this information about present day addiction?
According to this journalist, the only type of drug which is abused more by women than by men, worldwide, is tranquilizers.