What drug is used in Peaky Blinders? Tommy's habit goes back to the tunnels of France
What drug does Tommy Shelby use in Peaky Blinders, why the show keeps returning to it, and what the real history of shell shock after the First World War has to do with Birmingham's best-dressed gangster.
The whisky is decorative. The cigarettes are punctuation. The pipe is the point.
If you've watched even one episode of Peaky Blinders, you know Tommy Shelby's vices are basically a supporting cast: Irish whisky, roll-ups lit in slow motion, and — the one people actually google — that little clay pipe. So let's answer it plainly: the drug is opium. Brown opium, smoked from a clay pipe, usually alone, usually at night, usually after Tommy has heard something that isn't there.
Why the tunnels matter
Before he was Birmingham's most terrifying haberdashery enthusiast, Tommy was a tunneller in France — one of the sappers who dug under enemy lines during the First World War to plant explosives, in conditions that make a coal mine look like a spa. The show opens its very first episode with Tommy dreaming of those tunnels, then waking and reaching for the pipe.
The pattern is consistent across the series:
- The nightmares come from the war, not the gangster life.
- The opium isn't recreational — it's self-medication for what the 1920s called shell shock and we now call PTSD.
- Tommy isn't alone: Arthur and poor Danny Whizz-Bang carry the same damage, just wearing it differently.
At the time, there was essentially no treatment. Shell shock was widely treated as a moral failing rather than an injury, and men who came home broken were expected to simply crack on. Tommy's pipe is what "cracking on" looks like when nobody invented therapy yet.
The people who made him say as much
Cillian Murphy has talked about researching the condition before playing it, digging into the history of traumatised soldiers returning from the trenches.
"You have to do your due diligence," Murphy said of researching the communities and history behind his roles.
And creator Steven Knight has been clear that the drugs, the violence and the dead-eyed stare were never the destination — they were the starting wound.
Knight has described the whole series as "an exploration of Tommy becoming human again" after the war hollowed him out.
So no, it's not laudanum, it's not cocaine (that's other characters' department), and it's certainly not a quirky character flourish. It's opium, and it walked out of a tunnel in France with him.