Behind the soothing mist: Women and opiate use in the mining West, 1860--1900

This study investigates the presence of the addictive drug opium in three mining communities of the nineteenth-century American West with particular attention to the impact of the drug upon women. Virginia City, (Nevada) Tombstone, (Arizona) and Deadwood, (South Dakota) are settings that serve as case studies for the investigation of opium's presence in the American West via global trade and immigration, especially from China.;Opium use and attitudes toward opium addiction differed by class. Middle class sensibilities in mining towns demanded the closure of opium dens whenever their lure tempted members of the middle class to mingle with marginalized groups and the lower classes. Middle class women, however, used opium in "respectable" ways and thus avoided violating Victorian strictures of propriety.;What took decades elsewhere happened rapidly in the boom towns of Tombstone, Deadwood, and Virginia City. These mining communities were chosen because of the similarity of their "extractive" economies, their standard form of industrial capitalism, and their environmental degradation and health hazards. All three stood at some distance from more settled communities. All initially developed as "bachelor communities" whose substantial Chinese populations had historical and cultural traditions of opiate consumption.;There were two patterns of opiate consumption. One, medical and mainly among women, included self-administration of patent medicines (i.e., "over-the-counter" drugs) containing opiates. The second, non-medical, used opium for smoking, often in notorious dens, associated with the "vices" of marginal groups---prostitutes, gamblers, poor miners, "sporting characters," and Chinese.;Medicinal use of drugs among middle and upper class women was less controversial both because it lacked the stigma associated with recreational use and because of the demographic profile of the users. If used to relieve pain, real or fictional, it was not seen as recreational. Physicians, often with little understanding of drug addiction, inadvertently promoted women's opiate use by making prescriptions available to treat "female problems," or what the nineteenth century medical establishment referred to as hysteria.;Diaries, newspapers, sanitarium, hospital and orphanage records, and the census, as well as books and articles, reveal the conditions of the mining West that encouraged a flourishing addictive drug trade in the late Nineteenth Century, particularly among women.