Opium use was legal in California for much of the 1800s and was present in several immigrant communities in San Diego.

Around 2 a.m. on Monday, December 6, 1875, a "posse of police" led by Captain William Douglass descended on 609 Dupont Street in San Francisco. The cops arrested Fannie Whitmore, Cora Martinez, James ...

ST. PAUL — At the corner of Sixth and Cedar streets in St. Paul stood a small wooden building. Once a home for the area’s first European settlers, rain, snow and sunlight had baked the wooden panels ...

That comment reflected anxieties about opium-fostered race mixing, including the fear that Chinese men were using the drug to seduce or sexually enslave white women. "Within the walls of an opium den ...