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Journalism of Courage
Drugs were always known to be dangerous, but were not formally outlawed until this century. The fictional Sherlock Holmes took cocaine to relieve boredom, rather against Dr Watson8217;s advice. But a real life doctor at the time might may well have recommended it. Cocaine was purified from the coca plant in 1884: in 1887, an American neurologist was extolling its virtues as a tonic, at the rate of two grains to a pint of wine.
By the end of the decade the Parke-Davis Company in the US sold it over the counter in 15 forms, two for smoking and sniffing. Physicians introduced the hypodermic needle as a procedure less likely to foster addiction to opiates, and Parke Davis supplied the cocaine in a handy kit complete with syringe.
The advertising rubric said that the drug could 8220;make the coward brave, the silent eloquent and8230;render the sufferer insensitive to pain.8221;
It was available in a number of forms: Coca-Cola was introduced in 1886 as a temperance drink offering the virtues of coca without the vices of alcohol.
For most of human history, mood-altering drugs were available, usually in raw8217; or dilute form. When refined, they were often introduced as helpful medicines, and their prohibition across the Western world was piecemeal.
Laudanum, a derivative of opium, was a notoriously addictive painkiller, but people in pain welcomed it.
The young newspaperman Rudyard Kipling, later to become the poet of Empire, fell ill of a fever in Lahore in 1884. His manservant rolled him two pills of opium and gave him a pipe. 8220;I wasn8217;t in a condition to argue,8221; he told his aunt in England. 8220;I fell through the floor.
When I woke up I found my man waiting at the bed side where he had put me, with a glass of warm milk and a stupendous grin.8221; He turned the experience into a lurid short story of life in an opium den.
But chemists wanted to isolate whatever was in the raw opium. Bayer in Germany in 1898 marketed a white powder called heroin, synthesised from its morphine parent more than two decades earlier. It was sold over the counter in syrup as a cough mixture 8220;will suit the palate of the most exacting adult or the most capricious child,8221; a New York advert claimed.
The Observer News Service
