George Crabbe
(1754-1832)

Respectable British citizens like the parson and poet George Crabbe took opium for 40 years or more without discernible ill-effects. For in the era of the Romantic poets "most doctors and patients still thought of opium not as a dangerous addictive drug but mainly as a useful analgesic and tranquillizer of which every household should have a supply, for minor ailments and nervous crises of all kinds, much as aspirin is used today" (Alethea Hayter Alethea Hayter, Opium and the Romantic Imagination (London, 1968)

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