Scotland's Opium Secrets

Join Professor Jim Mills at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh as he traces the consumption of opium-based substances in Scotland in the early modern period. It explores their medical deployment during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by tracing their appearance in household recipe books and apothecaries' invoices.

By the 1700s Edinburgh was becoming a centre for medical research into opium products, even if controversies about them caused bitter disputes at the city's university and at the Royal College of Physicians.

Towards the end of the century physicians had started warning about the difficulties of breaking off the habit of consuming opium treatments, and as the nation entered the nineteenth-century opium products were increasingly seen as a menace rather than a marvel. Not only were the rapidly growing cities of the period turning to opium for the purposes of intoxication, but the nation's swindlers and robbers began to reimagine it as a source of poisons.

This lecture will show how the story of opium in Scotland was shaped by the wider currents of the nation's history of Enlightenment, imperialism, urbanisation and industrialization.

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Professor Mills teaches and researches the social history of psychoactive substances and the histories of health and medicine more broadly, particularly in contexts shaped by modern imperialism.

His publications include three monographs, Cannabis Nation: Control and consumption in Britain, c. 1928-2008, (Oxford University Press Oxford 2012); Cannabis Britannica: a social and political history of cannabis and British government, 1800-1928 (Oxford University Press Oxford 2005), and Madness, Cannabis and Colonialism: the 'native only' lunatic asylums of British India , 1857 to 1900, (Palgrave Basingstoke 2000).

He has served as Chair of the Wellcome Trust's Humanities Expert Review Group, as a member of the MRC: Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Global Expert Panel, and he is currently Secretary of the Scottish Parliament's Cross Party Group (CPG) on Medicinal Cannabis in 2024. His dissemination work includes a role in the BAFTA Award-winning series, Darren McGarvey's Addictions (Tern TV 2022) and appearances on BBC Radio's Thinking Allowed.

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Free for students (student card required), under 18s (ID card required) and RCPE Fellows or Members.

Please email library@rcpe.ac.uk if you are a student, under 18, RCPE Fellow or Member and would like to be added to the attendee list.