Opium use in English society in the nineteenth century was completely acceptable when it was used at a time a person was in a painful circumstance, such as when suffering from a tooth ache. Most all households had a bottle of laudanum, viz., opium dissolved in alcohol. No one thought ill of a person for keeping such a remedy handy or using it on occasions. Opium and all of the concoctions made from it were unrestricted until 1868, when the first Pharmacy Act became law.37 The local chemists would prepare their own favourite medical potions, and there indeed was variety of ingredients; but always there was added a liberal dose of opium.

"There were nationally famous and long-established preparations like Dover's Powder, that mixture of ipecacuanha and powdered opium originally prescribed for gout ... An expanding variety of commercial preparations began to come on the market at mid-century [18th]. They were typified by the chlorodynes -- Collis Browne's, Towle's and Freeman's. The children's opiates like Godfrey's Cordial and Dalby's Carminative were long-established. They were everywhere to be bought. There were local preparations, too like Kendal Black Drop, popularly supposed to be four times the strength of laudanum -- and well known outside its own locality because Coleridge used it."38

"... a toothache had obliged me [de Quincey] to take a few drops of laudanum. At what time or on what motive he had commenced the use of opium, he [Coleridge] did not say; but the peculiar emphasis on horror with which he warned me against forming a habit of the same kind, impressed upon my mind a feeling that he never hoped to liberate himself from the bondage my belief is that he never did."40