Who was the most notorious drug kingpin of all time? You might think it was Pablo Escobar, or maybe El Chapo—but you’d be wrong. More than 100 years before those guys were born, there was an incredibly powerful woman who controlled a drug empire so vast and so unimaginably lucrative that it made Escobar and El Chapo look like low-level street dealers. Plus, she wasn’t forced to live in a remote jungle compound surrounded by gun-toting thugs, because no one was coming after her. She also didn’t have to conceal her ill-gotten gains from the government tax collectors, because the proceeds from her drug operation were funding the entire country. And she didn’t have to worry about being thrown in prison because everyone with the authority to punish drug crimes was already on her payroll.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
She was Queen Victoria, and she was running the British Empire.
Queen Victoria was a huge fan of drugs. That’s probably not what you’d expect from a stodgy old queen, but that’s a popular misconception. People tend to think of Queen Victoria as being super old, but in reality, she was only 18 when she ascended the throne, and she routinely enjoyed using a wide variety of pharmaceuticals.
Opium was one of her favorites—but she didn’t smoke it in a pipe. In 19th-century Britain, the more fashionable way to ingest opium was to drink it in the form of laudanum. This heady one-two punch of opium and alcohol was widely used to knock out pain or discomfort, whatever the cause. It was sort of like aspirin before there was aspirin—respectable doctors even recommended it for toddlers who were teething. Queen Victoria drank a big swig of laudanum every morning, believing it was the perfect way for a royal teenager to start her day.
Cocaine was another of her darlings. It wasn’t illegal; it was brand-new, and Europeans were just starting to experiment with it. There were plenty of fun and exciting ways to consume cocaine back in the 1800s, but Queen Victoria’s personal preferences were chewing gum and wine. Cocaine chewing gum was perfect for soothing toothaches and sore gums from horrendous 19th-century British dentistry, plus it gave the chewer a powerful blast of self-confidence, which was great if you were a young, inexperienced queen trying hard to project a strong, assertive image.
Read More: How Queen Victoria Influenced Photography
She used a few other drugs, too. Per her doctor’s instructions, the queen sipped a liquid form of cannabis to relieve her monthly menstrual symptoms. And to cope with the agonizing pain of childbirth, Victoria enthusiastically embraced chloroform. She held a soaked handkerchief to her face for 53 minutes and described the experience as “delightful beyond measure.” As historian and author Tony McMahon summarized it in Smithsonian magazine: “Queen Victoria, I think by any standard, she loved her drugs.”
And while her personal consumption was prodigious, the adolescent monarch insisted on sharing her love of pharmaceuticals with the world—whether they wanted it or not.
From the moment she was crowned in 1837, the young queen inherited a king-size problem: British people drank too much tea. It wouldn’t have been a problem, except the tea was coming from China. The average London household was spending 5% of its income on Chinese tea, but Britain didn’t have anything to trade to China in return. China was getting rich, and Britain was growing resentful. The Brits were desperate to find something—anything—that Chinese people craved.
Opium ticked all the boxes. The Brits had tons of it because it grew abundantly in India, which was under British control thanks to the powerful East India Company’s domination of the Indian economy. It was an amazingly effective painkiller, which meant the Chinese were willing to pay insanely high prices for it. And most important, it was super addictive; people who used opium got hooked almost immediately, which meant the Brits could jack up the price even more. Britain had been shipping opium to China for years, but the amount grew exponentially once Queen Victoria assumed the throne.
Thanks to the miracle of opium, the trade imbalance was reversed overnight. China was forced to return all the silver the British had spent on tea, plus a great deal more. Now it was China, not Britain, that was racking up ruinous trade deficits.
China tried desperately to halt the opium trade. Opium was already illegal in China, but the laws were rarely enforced, so now the Chinese government started cracking down severely.
The emperor of China assigned his top man to the job. The guy’s name was Lin Zexu, and he was a scholar, philosopher, viceroy, and all-around teacher’s pet. His mission was to stop the flow of opium at all costs. He tried diplomacy, but it didn’t work. He wrote a letter to Queen Victoria, politely pointing out the immorality of what she was doing: China was shipping goods to Britain that were beneficial and useful, such as tea, silk, and pottery—so why was Britain responding by sending China poisonous drugs that were turning millions of innocent people into opium addicts?
But the British Empire wasn’t ready to give up its lucrative drug operation. Because now, opium sales were responsible for 15 to 20% of the British Empire’s entire annual revenue.
The queen didn’t bother to read the letter. This meant the doggedly persistent Lin Zexu needed to find another way to get her attention—so, in the spring of 1839, he intercepted a fleet of British ships, seized a massive shipment of opium, and ordered his soldiers to dump it all into the South China Sea.
This time, the queen noticed. Remember, she was only 20 years old and was used to things going her way. So when Lin Zexu and his men dumped 2.5 million pounds of British opium into the sea, she reacted like any all-powerful imperial teenager would: She declared war on China, known as the First Opium War. British forces laid waste to the Chinese army and slaughtered tens of thousands of Chinese citizens. The emperor had no choice but to capitulate. He signed a blatantly one-sided so-called peace treaty that handed over Hong Kong to the British, opened up even more ports for opium to flood into the country, and granted immunity to British citizens who were living in China.
Even worse, the whole world watched it happen. The Chinese empire had long been regarded as fearsome and indomitable, but not anymore. A petulant teenage queen had demonstrated to the world that China could be defeated, and fairly easily. Thus began the period referred to in textbooks as China’s “century of humiliation.”
That’s how a bullying teenager brought an esteemed ancient civilization to its knees. To the young queen, it was fine with her if untold numbers of foreigners halfway around the world died, so long as silver kept flowing. It was this ruthless, unabashed self-interest that made her the most successful drug kingpin of all time.
Though, because she genuinely believed that cocaine was a safe, healthy energy booster with no ill effects, Queen Victoria refused to sell it to the Chinese. She was happy to sell them all the opium in the world—whether they wanted it or not—but they’d better not touch her cocaine.
From HUMAN HISTORY ON DRUGS: An Utterly Scandalous but Entirely Truthful Look at History Under the Influence by Sam Kelly, published by Plume, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright (c) 2025 by Samuel Ezra Kelly.