THE PURSUIT OF OBLIVION: A GLOBAL HISTORY OF NARCOTICS 1500-2000

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

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 calculated 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 dastards 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 Union 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 Nevada, 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 except 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 controversy. 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=E9e and Alphonse
Daudet incorporated 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 unfairly 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 to 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 involving 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 trademark 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 topic: 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 hectare. 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?