The drugged old days

The current drugs ‘crisis’ has whipped the nation’s public commentators into near hysteria.

Recent reports about 1,591 indictable offences having been committed over a 26 month period on Dublin’s O’Connell Street have only added further lurid grist to the mill.
Underlying the outrage is an assumption that the country has gone to hell in a handcart and that the good old days were a golden era of civility. The truth, however, is far stranger than fiction.
Ireland in the late 19th century is depicted as a rather staid place where earnest buttoned-up Home Rulers made grandiose speeches whilst their chaste wives sat at home having a fit of the vapours playing a tinkling piano.
However, nothing could be further from the truth. In the 1890s O’Connell Street, was part of a vast red light district – reputedly the largest in Europe, boasting over 1200 prostitutes. Such was the volume of business in Monto District (as the area was then known), that old Dublin had four dedicated hospitals for the treatment of syphilis.
This fact alone makes the current syphilis epidemic look rather tame. Drugs, a major feature of Ireland from the 1980s, onwards were just as prevalent in the late 19th century. However, in those days they were legal and dirt cheap to buy.
Then, as now, the well-to-do took one type of drug with the poorer opting for the more garden variety mind-blowing concoctions. Opium was the narcotic of choice for Ireland’s dandies (fashionable young men) and was openly sold in pharmacies, largely in Dublin.
For those with less cash, there was crude liquid ether. The volatile hallucinogenic liquid was made by mixing poitin and sulphuric acid and was sold in penny bottles which went by the nickname Penny Dreadfuls.
And dreadful it was too. Although deaths directly attributable to ether were rare, many a thatched cottage accidentally burnt to the ground when an errant ether-head lit up his pipe afterwards. Ether gas, being highly flammable, was liable to ignite unless the place was well ventilated.
The ether was produced principally around the border counties and was sold in fairs and markets around the country by peddlers.
The procedure for imbibing the liquid, which evaporated at room temperature, was to drink a cup of cold water first and then to knock back the volatile liquid.
The reason for drinking the cold water was that it prolonged the high as it slowed down the speed at which the ether turned to gas once it hit the stomach.
So widespread was its use and abuse that there was an ether epidemic in the late 19th Century. Contemporary accounts of the time indicate that there were over 50,000 ether addicts.
In later years a vigorous campaign by the temperance movement eventually led to ether falling out of fashion.
Another drug which was commonly abused was the painkiller laudanum, a cocktail of opium and alcohol. Prescribed for everything from melancholy to colic, it soon became a popular recreation drug among the literary set and young bucks.
The Hell Fire Club in Dublin was a popular laudanum party destination among the dandies, and remained so until it was accidentally burnt to the ground in the late 1890s.
Another drug which was very popular in Ireland – especially among well-heeled ladies – was laughing gas or nitrous oxide, a mild anaesthetic.
Discovered by the scientist and clergyman, Joseph Priestley in 1793, laughing gas became widely available in the late 19th Century due to the invention of pressurised steel bottles.
The poet Robert Southey, who loved his laughing gas, was moved to write:“I am sure the air in heaven must be this wonder-working gas of delight.”
Such was the popularity of laughing gas parties in Dublin that it is the origin of the common Dublinese phrase ‘A Gas Man’, which charmingly describes someone who is full of good cheer and merriment. As a post historical footnote: laughing gas made a comeback in the UK in 2005 where it is now referred to as “Hippy Crack.”
The imported alcoholic beverage absinthe, which came with a lump of hallucinogenic wormwood floating in the bottle, was another popular narcotic in Victorian Ireland. Available in any premises that sold liquor, absinthe was quite pricey and cost almost twice as much as a bottle of whiskey.
The exotic drink eventually went out of fashion when the French authorities banned the addition of wormwood.
For the poor there was poitin. Made from potatoes or corn, the clear spirit was generally sold at strengths that would be considered lethal today. Cheap to buy at a shilling a bottle, the strength per volume was often in excess of 70% proof.
Drunkenness and the taking of medicinal drugs was not viewed through the prism of law and order in 19th Century Ireland, but rather from a public morals perspective. However, there was one exception to the rule, the brewing of poitin – and it was all to do with money.
With over 2,000 illicit stills throughout Ireland, the authorities were keen to extract excise duties from the brewers. So much so that a good portion of the Royal Irish Constabulary’s duties were taking up with searching for and seizing illicit stills.
Inishmurray off the north-west coast of Sligo was a major centre for poitin brewing. Yet despite its remoteness, in 1893 a detachment of RIC Revenue inspectors was quartered on the island.
The Royal Irish Constabulary numbered some 11,000 armed ‘peelers’ stationed in 1600 barracks around the country.
Such was the poor reputation of the rough and ready cops, however, that they were prohibited from entering any public house, not even for a social drink when they were off duty.
Very few accounts of the underbelly of 19th Century Ireland were recorded in the newspapers of the day, and this had a lot to do with social snobbery. Only the educated and well-to-do read newspapers, and licentiousness behaviour was seen as part and parcel of the way of life of the “lower orders”.
In the 21st Century, though, practically every newspaper in the land now devotes vast amounts of newsprint to the latest antics of the “lower orders” and the mind altering habits of today’s well-to do dandies.
Lurid books are written on the subject and legions of naïve social workers work themselves into a lather about how best to fix the problem. In reality, though, human nature cannot be fixed. Taxed perhaps, but not fixed.

Tom Prendeville (pictured) is a writer and filmmaker.