Opium References in Popular Culture, the 2026 List

Posted: January 2nd, 2026 | No Comments »

I’ve been spotting opium references in popular culture with interest for quite a few years now (2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012) about just how opium keeps on fascinating us. However, 2025 was a little thin compared to other years so I skipped it – so any other spotted references most welcome?

Novels:

Opium as a pain killer, but with a propensity to turn patients into addicts, makes repeated appearances in Xiaolu Guo’s reworking on Moby Dick with a female protagonist Call Me Ishmaelle…. Saint Tropez opium runners get a mention in Helen Wolff’s 1932 novel Background For Love, recently translated into English from German for the first time by her grandson, Tristram Wolff. Opium made a return in Abir Mukherjee’s latest Wyndham and Bannerjee novel set in 1920s Calcutta, Burning Grounds. Wyndham is still struggling with the Big Smoke.

Authors Christopher Chu and Maggie Hoi’s Camilo Pessanha’s Macau Stories is part novel, part biography, part epistolary journey, part history but does tell the life of the Portuguese Symbolist poet Pessanha who lived for several decades in Macao, and was a ferocious opium addict too….

TV:

Mark Gatiss’s wonderful Bookish set in post-war London featured a morphine addict…

Apparently the Black Stuff is not always enough and Anne Guinness enjoys a bit of laudanum with her family beverage in Netflix’s House of Guinness…

And of course Sugar Goodson (the never-disappointing Stephen Graham) in A Thousand Blows was on the tinctures….

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