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Too often we assume that Marx felt that he (or rather Feuerbach) had put the last nail in the coffin of religion. And too often we assume that he did not hear the knocking from the inside of the coffin. However, Marx was a little more astute than that, as Molyneux points out. Here there is a hint of the ambivalence of religion. Religious suffering may be an expression of real suffering and religion may be the sigh, heart and soul of a heartless and soulless world. But it is also a protest against that suffering. That point has been made often enough but there is an ambivalence in the most well known of Marx’s phrases: it is the opium of the people. In an excellent article McKinnon points out that the role of opium was ambiguous in 19th century Europe.³² In contrast to our own associations of opium with drugs, altered states, addicts, organised crime, wily Taliban insurgents, and desperate farmers making a living the only way they can, attitudes to opium were, in Marx’s day, much more ambivalent. Widely regarded as a beneficial, useful and cheap medicine at the beginning of the century, it was increasingly vilified by a coalition of medical and religious forces. In between debates raged. McKinnon traces in detail how opium was the centre of debates, defences and parliamentary inquiries, how it was used for all manner of ills and to calm children, how the opium trade was immensely profitable, how it was one of the only medicines available for the working poor, albeit often adulterated, how it was a source of utopian visions for artists and poets, and how it was increasingly stigmatised as a source of addiction and illness. In effect, it ran all the way from blessed medicine to recreational curse.

Marx himself was a regular user of opium, along with arsenic and creosote. As he followed a punishing schedule of too much writing, too little sleep and an inadequate diet, Marx would use it for his carbuncles, toothaches, liver problems, bronchial coughs and so on.