-Caveat Lector-
From
http://books.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4326434,00.html
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But then I got high
In The Pursuit of Oblivion, Richard Davenport-Hines' hugely enjoyable
exploration of the long history of addiction, Tim Radford discovers
that demand has always been there
Tim Radford
Saturday December 29, 2001
The Guardian
The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Narcotics 1500-2000
Richard Davenport-Hines
466pp, Weidenfeld, �20
George IV, while Prince Regent, wrenched his ankle dancing a highland
fling in 1811 and made himself feel better with 100 drops of laudanum
every three hours. By 1820, when he ascended the throne, he was
routinely binging on laudanum and cherry brandy and behaving,
according to the clerk of his Privy Council "like a spoiled, selfish,
odious beast". By the time he died he had laudanum for breakfast,
along with beef and pigeon pie, white wine, champagne and brandy, in
vast quantities.
Other famous folk in the history of narcotics exhibited self-control but showed signs,
nonetheless, of dependence. William Wilberforce, the slave-trade abolitionist, took
opium before making a long address. "To that," he
said, "I owe my success as a public speaker." Clive of India, having established the
security of the East India Company, took the drug for chronic malaria and gallstones,
and whenever he was depressed. When the 31st Earl
of Mar died of jaundice and dropsy in 1828, the Edinburgh Life Assurance Company made
history by refusing to pay on its policy, after learning that the Earl had been
"addicted to the vice of opium- eating in a degree calc
ulated to shorten life".
High society, high moral ground or high finance, all were just as likely to get high
on the stuff that oozed from the incised seed-head of the poppy. Richard
Davenport-Hines's headlong and hugely enjoyable account offers
perspective: drug abuse is not a new phenomenon. There are more people to get stoned,
and more things to get stoned on. But from the beginning, when the stuff was on offer,
people took it.
Demand came not just from the about-to-be-addicted. There were pushers in powerful
places. Medical men swore by it. "It banishes melancholy, begets confidence, converts
fear into boldness, makes the silent elequent and da
stards brave," said the influential 18th-century Scottish physician John Brown. Opium
was used to treat endemic dystentery during the American civil war, and as a
prophylactic against malaria. Poppies were grown in both U
nion and Confederate states. Ten million pills were issued to Union forces, and 284m
ounces of tinctures and powders.
The Indian imperial government raised income by selling opium to China. Chinese
addicts took their habit to Stepney in London and to the goldfields of California.
Opium-smoking shops opened in Carson City and Reno in Neva
da, and then in Chicago, St Louis, New Orleans and New York. These were patronised by
respectable white Americans. Some of them told a police officer in 1881 that: "When
the longing comes on them, they cannot satisfy it e
xcept in a low Chinese den; that the idea of smoking good opium in a clean pipe and in
their own rooms doesn't seem to fit the bill."
People looked for less destructive narcotics. Coca leaves when chewed seemed to give
stamina to Peruvian labourers; by 1860 coca extract was tested as an anaesthetic and
proposed as a treatment for melancholia. A solution
of coca in claret was marketed as a pacifier for babies and a pick-me-up for the
elderly in 1863. An American sportsman was accused of chewing coca leaves to win a
24-hour walking race, the first case of a drugs-sport co
ntroversy. A Devon doctor filled his flask with coca tincture instead of brandy in
1876. "Down went the birds right and left," he reported. "Eureka, I said to myself,
the coca has made me a steady shot."
Demand was always there. Chloral hydrate, when it appeared in 1869 as an anaesthetic,
seemed to produce a healthier sleep in insomniacs than any of the opiates. By 1871
around 36 million doses of narcotic chloral had been
hit an enthusiastic market and drunkards were reaching for the stuff in preference to
booze.
Amyl nitrite intended for cholera and tetanus treatment seemed simultaneously to lower
blood pressure and relieve angina pectoris. Its effect on women's pains during
childbirth was "simply magical". Other properties were
quickly discovered. The heavy masturbation of the young Marcel Proust, says
Davenport-Hines, was surely increased by his bedtime custom of inhaling two amyl
capsules to ward off asthma attacks.
Meanwhile, in old Styria, now southern Austria and northern Slovenia, the locals were
hooked on another chemical: they ate increasing quantities of arsenic as an
aphrodisiac. Prosper Merim�e and Alphonse Daudet incorporat
ed a British arsenic prescriber in their novels; in the southern US, people dropped
the stuff into their coffee. A Lancashire cotton-broker used arsenic and strychnine as
priapic stimulants, dying somewhat early. Rather u
nfairly perhaps, his young wife was prosecuted for his murder, "choosing, ingeniously,
a drug which he was in the habit of taking medicinally".
Chloroform made its appearance in 1847 as a reliable anaesthetic. Ether however
remained in demand, especially in Ireland, Norway and rural Galicia, as a popular
intoxicant. In 1856, chloroform and morphine were bottled t
o make Dr Collis-Brown's Chlorodyne, to ease cholera, diarrhoea, coughs, influenza,
neuralgia, rheumatism, bronchitis and other ills. Well, it would, wouldn't it? It also
helped add to the growing pool of morphine addicts
. (The most unexpected people took morphine. Enid Bagnold, author of the novel
National Velvet , was a morphine addict for 60 years. She also took amphetamines. She
died at 91.)
In 1884, a US Civil War veteran developed a stimulant that would wean people from
morphine: it was cocaine in wine. Fearing that temperance campaigners would make him a
target, he also developed a non-alcoholic drink invo
lving both coca and kola. In 1898 the German firm of Bayer devised a wonderful new
cough suppressor called diacetylmorphine as a treat ment for asthma, catarrh,
bronchitis, emphysema and tuberculosis. They gave it the tra
demark name of Heroin and described it as "non-habit forming". It was another 20 years
before national and international law began to turn the painkillers, cough-suppressors
and sleep-inducers of big business into illegal
substances.
And did that work? Illicit drugs now account for 8% of all international trade.
Davenport-Hines's book pounds through the snorting, sniffing, smoking, injecting,
pill-popping centuries, and his approach is very like his t
opic: addictive, and dizzying. There is a dimension missing: opium, coca and marijuana
are cash crops that offer near-desperate peasants and subsistence farmers in the
developing world a very high return on yield per hect
are. But they, too, are hooked. Growing economies might be better off
growing food.
This chronicle, however, has a metropolitan perspective that informs
argument rather than analysis. He sees a choice between regulation
and prohibition: "a minor chronic pest or an unbeatable and
destructive adversary". He sees prohibition as little more than a
business incentive for unscrupulous entrepreneurs. And he does not
see absolute sobriety "as a natural or primary human state". The way
he tells it, how could he?
Guardian Unlimited � Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001
End<{{{
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A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled
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--- Ernest Hemingway
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