Drugs

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DRUGS

From the Middle Ages, drugs referred to medicinal substances employed by chemists, pharmacists, and apothecaries. The word did not take on its modern associations with narcotics in particular until the mid-nineteenth century, with the increased recognition of opiate addiction. Once concepts and terminology evolved to address phenomena involving opiates, they transferred easily to substances such as cannabis and cocaine. Hallucinogens, however, were not widely acknowledged until the mid-twentieth century.

opiates

For centuries, opium (the congealed juice of poppy seed pods) was used in folk remedies and patent medicines to treat many common afflictions. It was cheaper than liquor, a fact often blamed for its popularity as a Saturday night recreation for English Midland factory hands and fenland farm workers in the 1830s and 1840s. As early as 1700, a few treatises on opium noted effects such as tolerance (the necessity for ever greater dosages to produce the original effect) and withdrawal (the onset of uncomfortable symptoms when dosages of the substance are decreased or halted), but these phenomena were little discussed until the mid-nineteenth century. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) by Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859) built upon a pattern hinted at in the 1816 poem "Kubla Khan" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), establishing opium in the European popular imagination as both an exotic Oriental hallucinogen and the object of a shameful thralldom. Both writers also associated opium with visionary artistry, a connection cemented by other prominent artists who addressed opium in their works or were notorious users themselves, including English writers Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), Lord Byron (1788–1824), and Charles Dickens (1812–1870), American writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), French writer Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), and French composer Hector Berlioz (1803–1869).

One reason opium's addictive tendencies went largely unremarked until midcentury was that raw opium is much less addictive than its alkaloid, morphine, which was first isolated in 1803 by the German pharmacist Friedrich Sertürner (1783–1841) and made popular throughout the developed world by the advent of the hypodermic syringe in the 1850s. By the 1870s, European medical professionals led by the Austrian Heinrich Obersteiner (1847–1922) and the German Eduard Levinstein (1831–1882) had defined a new disease known as "morphinism" or "morphinomania," characterized by a compulsion to use morphine. Linked closely to the treatment and legal control of alcoholism, the treatment of opiate addiction emerged as a new medical specialty.

Opium was also inextricably linked in the nineteenth-century with "the Orient," in part because popular traveler's tales often featured exotic Orientals eating or smoking opium, and the majority of the drug in European domestic use came from Turkey, Persia, and Egypt. Furthermore, the British East India Company's smuggling activities precipitated two so-called Opium Wars with China (1839–1842 and 1856–1860), prompting anti-opium crusaders to warn that Britain would someday suffer retribution. Such fears spread in the latter half of the nineteenth century. They figured prominently in published accounts of Oriental and English smokers in supposedly innumerable Chinese opium dens in London's East End, despite evidence that there were only a few modest establishments with any claim to the title at the time.

hashish

Oriental exoticism also pervaded the infamous Club des Haschischins, a group of Parisian intellectuals fascinated with the "Assassins" (Haschischins), legendary Islamic militants who reputedly smoked hashish (the resin secreted by flowers of the hemp plant) to see visions of paradise, be thereby inspired to murder their religious enemies, and so gain entrance to paradise. Members of the Club des Haschischins included Baudelaire, Gérard de Nerval (1808–1855), Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870), and Théophile Gautier (1811–1872). According to Gautier's 1846 account in Revue des Deux Mondes, members met in a secret Paris location where the drug was administered by an eminent doctor, often assumed to have been the psychologist Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours (1804–1884), who reported his self-experimentation with hashish in Du Haschisch et de l'Aliénation Mentale (1845; Hashish and mental illness). Baudelaire later recorded his own impressions of hashish and published them along with loosely translated excerpts from De Quincey's Confessions as Les paradis artificiels (1860; Artificial paradises). Gautier's and Baudelaire's descriptions of hashish were faintly echoed in Britain in a smattering of anonymous magazine articles and in the reference by Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) to an Oriental "green paste" associated with the title character's debauchery in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). Interest in the United States was evident in such publications as Fitz Hugh Ludlow's The Hasheesh Eater (1857) and H. H. Kane's subsequently famous "A Hashish-House in New York" in Harper's Monthly (1883).

cocaine

Workers in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador, where the coca plant grows wild, had long chewed coca leaves to limit fatigue and provide pleasure. The plant's potential was not widely noted in Europe, however, until the active alkaloid was isolated and named in 1860 by a graduate student, Albert Niemann (1834–1861), working with the chemistry professor Friedrich Wöhler (1800–1882) at the University of Göttingen. The same decade saw the advent of Vin Mariani, a Bordeaux wine steeped with coca leaves. First manufactured in 1863 by the French chemist Angelo Mariani (1832–1914), this coca wine became popular with drinkers throughout Europe, including Queen Victoria (r. 1837–1901) and Popes Leo XIII (r. 1878–1903) and Pius X (r. 1903–1914). It spawned imitations, most notably Coca-Cola, a preparation of coca leaves and cola nuts first marketed as a tonic in the United States in 1886. In 1883, German army physician Theodor Aschenbrandt published his findings that cocaine improved the endurance of soldiers. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) read Aschenbrandt's article and experimented with cocaine on himself and others. He published a glowing account in 1884, making him one of the most visible representatives of a class of medical professionals who were initially enthusiastic about cocaine, as some others had been about morphine. As the danger of addiction and psychotic symptoms became clearer, however, recriminative counterarguments followed and Freud's professional reputation suffered.