Victorian Narcos: How a Royal Taste Helped Mainstream Modern Drugs

More than 100 years before 'El Chapo' and Pablo Escobar, there was a woman who controlled a drug empire so vast and so unimaginably lucrative that it made them look like low-level street dealers.

“More than 100 years before El Chapo and Pablo Escobar, there was a woman who controlled a drug empire so vast and so unimaginably lucrative that it made them look like low-level street dealers.” Time Magazine, June 2025.

Throughout the mid-late 1800s, Victorian Britain wrapped itself in propriety while swallowing a pharmacy, and the court led by example. Throughout my research on this subject, two things stood out: one, psychoactive drugs were not fringe; they were fashionable, commercial, and respectable. Two, power set the tone. When elites consumed and endorsed these products, the public followed. This has been proven time and time again.

Queen Victoria sits at the center of this story.

Author Sam Kelly explores Queen Victoria’s drug use and the vast, lucrative opium and cocaine empire she controlled (Image: Time Magazine, Sam Kelly, 2025)

Time’s historical essay by Sam Kelly describes the Queen as a routine consumer of the era’s leading medicinals: laudanum (an opium tincture), cocaine in the form of gums and coca wines such as Vin Mariani, and cannabis-based preparations; it also notes her celebrated acceptance of chloroform in childbirth, which normalised obstetric anaesthesia for millions. Victorian cultural historians likewise document how chloroform became respectable after its high-profile royal use. For cannabis, J. Russell Reynolds, later Physician-in-Ordinary to the Queen, published in The Lancet in 1890 that, when pure and carefully dosed, cannabis indica could be “one of the most valuable medicines we possess” for certain complaints.

In 19th-century Britain, opium wasn’t hidden in back-alley dens. It was poured into teacups. The fashionable choice was laudanum, a potent mix of opium and alcohol prescribed for almost any discomfort. Queen Victoria reportedly began her day with a generous measure, a routine shared by many in her social circle.

However, her medicine cabinet didn’t end there.

On her physician’s advice, she took liquid cannabis to ease menstrual pain. And during childbirth, she famously inhaled chloroform from a handkerchief for nearly an hour, later calling the relief “delightful beyond measure.”

When Queen Victoria took the throne in 1837, Britain faced a trade crisis: Chinese tea was draining household incomes, but Britain didn’t have anything to trade in return. The empire’s solution was opium from British-controlled India because they had access to tons of it. It was highly effective, addictive, and in demand, fuelling a surge in exports to China. It was then that Britain’s drug trade exploded exponentially.

Ask yourself this: If the palace modelled these practices, what did that signal to doctors, advertisers, and families across the empire?

The Marketplace That Royalty Helped Legitimise

Coca wines, opiate syrups, and “nerve tonics” flourished because they were legal, aggressively marketed, and often effective at short-term symptom relief.