SNOW BUSINESS

Joseph F. Spillane COCAINE: From medical marvel to modem menace in the
United States 1884-1920 214pp. Johns Hopkins University Press; distributed
in the UK by Plymbridge. $3l. TLS $29. 0801862302

Paul Gootenberg, editor COCAINE: Global histories 290pp. Routledge.
$45 (paperback, $14.99). TLS $42; $12.99. 0415192471

History is the most dangerous concoction the chemistry of the mind has
produceed, Paul Valery wrote. "It sets people dreaming, intoxicates them,
engenders false memories, exaggerates their reflexes, keeps old wounds
open, torments their leisure, inspires them with megalomania or persecution
complex." The history of cocaine promises double rations of these
disturbing phenomena.

Joseph F. Spillane has written an immaculate monograph on the drug's early
history in the United States of America; though some parts of his story
have been covered by previous historians, his use of archives and diverse
other sources means that he writes with unparalleled authority.

The scientific, medical and commercial elements of cocaine's early history
are recapitulated masterfully; and his study of the supply of cocaine, and
the behaviour of its users in their social milieux, constitutes major
revisionism with lessons for contemporary policy.

Paul Gootenberg has edited a collection of historical essays on the
international supply networks of cocaine since the 1880s. Almost all are of
a high standard of research, insight and analysis, and they make valuable
supplementary reading to Spillane; Marcel de Kort's summary of his
dissertation on Dutch cocaine history makes one wish that the full study
was available in English. Although de Kort's is perhaps the most important
essay in Gootenberg's collection, Mary Roldan's study of Colombia and
Steven Karch on Japan are also conspicuously informative and suggestive.

After the discovery in 1884 that cocaine was a superb anaesthetic in eye,
nose and mouth surgery, the drug was widely adopted by American physicians
in anaesthesia, as a tome for mind and body, and in the treatment of opiate
addiction, alcoholism and sinus conditions. But as early as 1890 these same
physicians were discarding its therapeutic use. They recognized that the
habit could develop rapidly after the intiation of use, that addicts
increased their doses more rapidly with cocaine than with opiates and that
abstinence was often difficult.

Both American and European medical experts identified cocaine with loss of
self-control. "Nineteenth century opiate addicts often lived with their
addictions for years without seriously impairing their family relations or
their ability to work", as Spillane demonstrates. By contrast, "nearly
every published case of cocaine addiction ... mentioned startling physical
deterioration and associated behavioural changes".

The sophistication of physicians' use of cocaine - "their attentiveness to
the effects of form, dosage, route of administration and even setting" -
was far superior to their introduction of chloral or the hypodermic
administration of morphine which had taken place a few decades earlier.

As the medical prescription of cocaine diminished, so cocaine snuffs
professing to cure asthma and catarrh were strenuously marketed The cocaine
content of most such products was about 5 per cent, although Ryno's Hay
Fever and Catarrh Remedy was 99 per cent cocaine.

Cocaine snuffs and sprays created social problems among adolescents and
young men. "I have a son that has been using it and have tried for the last
year to break him from it", one parent railed against Ryno's. "It is
ruining our boys."

Spillane uses pharmaceutical archives and the trade press to demonstrate
that the increased capacity of the American pharmaceutical industry to
produce, market and distribute new products popularized cocaine.

By 1903, despite declining medical interest in its therapeutic use and
physicians' disapproval of its unregulated distribution, American cocaine
consumption had grown to five times the level of 1890. This problem
contributed to the foundation of the Federal Drug Administration in 1906.
Soaring consumption was not solely the result of aggressive marketing by
pharmaceutical businesses. Around 1890, roustabouts toiling on the
waterfronts of New Orleans and the Mississippi River "adopted cocaine as a
drug compatible with the demands of hard labor and fast living". when these
stevedores went to work elsewhere in the American South, they took their
habits with them The managers of Southern construction camps and
Mississippi River plantations used cocaine as a means of increasing
production and managing their workforce.

The drug was popular in Colorado mining camps by 1894. It was supplied at
company stores; according to a labour organizer: "the workers, once
addicted, cannot think of going away from their source of supply."

In textile mills, cocaine was popularized by supervisors and employers as
well as by workers themselves. This popularity among the black labouring
poor led, by the end of the century, to racist panics about black "cocaine
fiends" going on sexual and other rampages against white people, and after
1900 legislation against the drug's use was introduced in many localities.

In America, cocaine use and attitudes to its users seem to have been
distinctive. Few Europeans of this period set out to acquire the cocaine
habit for pleasure or to defy the authorities. The case of Sarah
Bernhardt's husband Jacques Damala was an early exception in France; but as
late as 1897, the addiction expert Sir Clifford Allbutt (George Eliot's
model for Dr Lydgate) had "never seen a case of cocainism m which the drug
was sought from the beginning for its own sake". Yet in the US, cocaine
after about 1893 joined the other vices - opium, tobacco and alcohol -
favoured by prostitutes, pimps, gamblers and hoodlums in American towns and
cities. The association of cocaine use with social settings and pleasure
appeared to confirm that users were deliber ately seeking a deviant
identity. Spillane prints a fascinating account dating from 1896 of "a
cocaine joint disguised as a drugstore" operating in St Louis, Missouri. It
had its sordid counterparts in all the big cities.

A police investigation of 1909 identified sixty-three similar drugstores m
the Tenderloin district of New York. Spillane anatomizes this distribution
system with unprecedented precision.

Years before state or federal laws were introduced to regulate access to
cocaine, many druggists were declining to sell it in large amounts, or to
certain types of customer This voluntary self-restraint accentuated the
specialized and geographically specific network between cocaine suppliers
and their clients.

Except in vice districts, or marginal urban areas, "cocaine retailers faced
critical scrutiny from within their communities The private language of the
1890s cocaine sub-culture - calling the drug coke, snow, or brighteye, for
example - "highlights the functional purpose of concealing the nature of
the transaction from either social or legal sanction".

Spillane demonstrates that the prohibition of non-medical use of cocaine
under state laws, and the federal Harrison Act of 1914, merely reinforced
existing trends to underground sales, low purity, adulteration and high
prices. High cocaine prices and economic crime began before Prohibition.
'Moth critics and supporters of prohibitionist policies", he concludes,
equate much too facilely the acceptability and accessibility of a drug with
its legal status.

This easy equation was not true in the past, nor is it true today."

The illicit use of cocaine in the US almost vanished in the late 1940s.
However, the refusal by American leaders to treat illicit drugs "simply as
commodities" that "shape and are shaped by demand and supply, exchange and
consumption" has proved disastrous in the past thirty years.

The co-operative programmes against marijuana cultivation and smuggling
launched by the US and Mexican governments in 1969 diverted traffickers
from the marijuana business to cocaine with memorable results in the 1970s
and 1980s. Spillane's Cocaine shows that the better chance of reducing
illicit drug consump-tion lies in commodification of the substances rather
than in symbolic crusades and warrior rhetoric.

Reading Joseph Spillane and Paul Gootenberg's essayists together, it seems
that the United States' historical experience of cocaine has always been
extreme and atypical.

It is always inappropriate for Europeans to fol-low American models of
drugs regulation and policing too closely.

The cultural reasons that made the Americans such a special case should be
a matter of imperative study.