by Howard Marks
A drug culture can spread fast, and not least in such times of social unease as no doubt existed when the Manchu emperors were beginning to fail at their job.
Sensing that their ancient culture – which had surrounded them comfortingly from cradle to grave – might be entering the agony of breakdown, some Chinese must have sought a similar consolation to that found by the opium-eating romantic writers of Europe in their escape from the early horrors of urban industrialism. The use of opium in China was not simply a question of economics, though supplies may have been pumped in under an urgent economic pressure.
A few grains of opium give the novice a feeling of euphoria. His first pipe is the future addict’s honeymoon; but afterwards comes a wearisome listlessness. To face life once more he must decide either to leave opium alone, or to go on repeating and, usually, increasing his dose. The Chinese formed from experience the view that one pipe smoked daily for a week or ten days would leave a man in the grip of addiction thereafter.
He would soon work up to three pipes a day, and at this point one day without opium would bring on acute withdrawal symptoms: giddiness, watering of the eyes, prostration, torpor. A three-pipe addict, denied his drug for longer than one day, might expect to go through hell: a chill over the whole body, an ache in all his limbs to the very bone, diarrhoea, and agonising psychic misery. To break the habit by an act of will was somewhat rare.
A smoker well able to afford his daily dose, if by some lucky chance of body chemistry he was under no compulsion to increase it, might hope to reach equilibrium – as with the present-day heroin ‘user’, so-called. This was the lucky man the professional apologists for the opium trade were later fond of pointing to – the addict who lived to be eighty. A prosperous Chinese official might well manage his life like this, but the money income of an ordinary Chinese who began smoking opium was liable to be so small that he could afford his drug only by neglecting his family, which would eventually exile him from Chinese society, and make of him a social pariah.
Intelligent Chinese saw opium in extreme terms – as a social poison introduced by foreign enemies. To their country’s two armed conflicts between 1838 and 1860 with Britain (later allied with France) – periods of open warfare linked by a turbulent armed truce – they have, reasonably enough, given the name, the Opium Wars.
The Chinese Opium Wars, 1977
So then Oxford Street, stony-hearted stepmother, thou that listenest to the sighs of orpans, and drinkest the tears of children, at length I was dismissed from thee
Thomas De Quincey
R.K. Newman
Opium-Smoking in Late Imperial China: A Reconsideration
A SOCIAL PROBLEM in one country may often be held up as an example to others, but it is rare for it to bring forth an internationally coordinated response with a world-wide application. One of these rarities is the campaign against ‘hard’ drugs. While liquor laws differ widely from country to country, the modern system of laws against cocaine and the opiates have been established by international convention. These arrangements evolved out of the measures taken to help imperial China with its opium problem, which was regarded, at least in part, as a foreign responsibility arising out of the vast quantities of Indian opium which had been imported by foreigners into China throughout the nineteenth century, often in questionable circumstances. The behaviour of the opium merchants and their governments seemed all the more reprehensible because of the encouragement which it gave to the Chinese to break their own government’s laws against opium-smoking and poppy cultivation. The first International Opium Commission met in Shanghai in 1909 and passed a number of resolutions to help China; it also laid down principles of cooperation between producing and consuming countries which tended logically to expand in scope and force, leading to a global system of control of all narcotic substances, and to the institutionalisation of these arrangements under the United Nations.
China has also been a major influence on the world’s understanding of the ‘opium evil’. Unfortunately much of the information about China was tendentious from the start as missionary and philanthropic organisations tried to mobilise public opinion against opium and exert political leverage against the trade. The classic depiction of the Chinese opium smoker – a pathetic and degenerate creature with ‘lank and shrivelled limbs, tottering gait, sallow visage, feeble voice and death-boding glance of eye’ – became established as a stereo-type and was reinforced by literary and journalistic depictions of opium dens, xenophobic reactions to Chinese communities abroad and late-nineteenth-century intellectual movements such as progressive and social Darwinism. The depiction of the Chinese opium smoker now finds its echo in the popular image of the modern junkie, ‘screwed up’ by heroin into an emaciated human wreck. These mental images seem to be ineradicable, despite the fact that many chronic opiate users are indistinguishable in everyday life from their fellow citizens and despite the scientific studies which have uncovered ‘either only minor injurious effects or none at all that can be traced directly to the drug’.
This last point needs to be stressed because the physiological dangers of opium consumption were greatly exaggerated in the late nineteenth century and these exaggerations have shaped our assumptions about the drug ever since; in addition, our anxieties about opium have been reinforced in modern times by the activities of the underworld drug pusher, with his heavily adulterated heroin and his financial interest in maximising the damage to his clients. The Chinese smoker consumed chandul, a purified and concentrated solution of poppy sap and water. Medical experiments with this form of the drug and with pure samples of its derivatives, heroin and morphine, have shown few if any harmful effects upon the human body.
Historians have done little to clarify these aspects of the subject. Some have found it useful to repeat the condemnations of opium, since these provide evidence of the social damage done by British imperialism. Others have treated the subject more dispassionately but without breaking away from the assumptions that the missionaries so vigorously promoted: that all opium use is harmful and that it leads to addiction and therefore to physical ruin.
If we are to understand the true effect of opium on the health of individual Chinese, and cumulatively on Chinese society, we must distinguish carefully between those who were addicted, those who were damaged in some way by the addiction, and the many millions of light and moderate consumers who were not addicted at all.
[D]ens did not necessarily promote immoderate use: ‘I have been in no place in China,’ wrote the British consul in Chefoo, ‘where fewer signs of opium-smoking are brought to one’s notice.’ In spite of their evil reputation in the West, most Chinese opium dens were no more dingy and disgusting than other public places, such as inns. It is true that some were disreputable, though that was due more to the gambling that went on in them than to the opium that was consumed there. Many others, however, were clean and homely, their customers quiet and self-absorbed. The more fashionable dens in the cities were positively opulent. One of the largest in Shanghai was built around a courtyard which was laid out with shrubs and rockeries. Inside was a succession of public and private rooms with carved and gilded ceilings, furnished with couches and tables and provided with finely crafted pipes, lamps and tea sets, ‘an excellent example of sensual oriental luxury’. It reminded the Western visitor of the best coffee shops in Paris, London and Vienna: ‘there was no crowding, no loud talking; the guests lingered over their tea and lamp from three-quarters of an hour to an hour, then went away as unhurriedly and self-possessed as they had entered’.
Another advantage of reconsidering the history of opium in a way that removes the usual moralistic and anti-foreign biases is that it focuses attention on opium as an economic and political phenomenon in China itself. An important and little-studied aspect, and one where modern parallels abound, is the spread of opium production within the Chinese empire; it is clear that the techniques of poppy cultivation and juice extraction were known long before the import trad
e began in Canton. Some provinces had substantial Muslim minorities and these may have been the agents in transplanting the poppy from older and more developed centres of Islamic culture, in one case along the central-Asian trade routes from the Middle East and in the other from Mughal India through Burma. Perhaps we should see the poppy’s presence in China as part of the geographical diffusion of a useful crop, and possibly as an element in the diffusion of central-Asian cultures, rather than as a curse visited by imperialists on a weaker nation.
The history of opium in China should focus more on the native variety of the drug, the conditions of production and the social controls over consumption and concern itself less with foreign opium and the problems of addiction. Our view of the subject has been distorted for too long by the myth of the addict, with his wasted frame and ‘death-boding glance of eye’.
Opium-smoking undoubtedly produced some addicts, and some of those addicts were reduced to a pitiable condition, but it is not their image that should be foremost in the mind; we should also remember the peasants carrying their lumps of poppy juice to market, the boatmen wrapped in their blankets passing round an opium pipe in the twilight, and the Chinese gentleman smoking peaceably at home with his friends. It is not the existence of addiction that requires explanation so much as the fact that, in a society in which opium was cheap and widely available, so many people smoked lightly or not at all. The production and consumption of opium were, for most people, normal rather than deviant activities and it is the implications of this normality which ought to be explored, both for the sake of China’s history and for the sake of their relevance to modern societies learning to live with drugs.
From: Modern Asian Studies 29, 4, 1995
Aleister Crowley
Diary of a Drug Fiend
WHEN ONE IS on one’s cocaine honeymoon, one is really, to a certain extent, superior to one’s fellows. One attacks every problem with perfect confidence. It is a combination of what the French call élan and what they call insouciance.
The British Empire is due to this spirit. Our young men went out to India and all sorts of places, and walked all over everybody because they were too ignorant to realise the difficulties in their way. They were taught that if one had good blood in one’s veins, and a public-school and university training to habituate one to being a lord of creation, and to the feeling that it was impossible to fail, and not to knowing enough to know when one was beaten, nothing could ever go wrong.
We are losing the Empire because we have become ‘sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought’. The intellectuals have made us like the ‘the poor cat i’ the adage’. The spirit of Hamlet has replaced that of Macbeth. Macbeth only went wrong because the heart was taken out of him by Macduff’s interpretation of what the witches had said. Coriolanus only failed when he stopped to think. As the poet says, ‘The love of knowledge is the hate of life.’
Cocaine removes all hesitation. But our forefathers owed their freedom of spirit to the real liberty which they had won; and cocaine is merely Dutch courage. However, while it lasts, it’s all right.
Diary of a Drug Fiend, 1970
I have measured out my life in coffee spoons
T.S. Eliot
Stewart Lee Allen
The Revolution
I STARTED THIS coffeecentric history of humanity in jest.
After all, people have made similar charts based on the rise and fall of the hemline, and it would be absurd, even for me, to fail to acknowledge that historic events are spawned by a myriad of circumstances. But the coincidences at times seem overwhelming. When coffee was the sole provenance of the Arabs, their civilization flourished beyond all others. Once the Ottomans got hold of the bean, they became the most powerful and tolerant nation on the planet. Its early appearance in Great Britain helped jump-start that nation’s drive for world dominance. It was in the cafés of Paris that the French Revolution was born.
Napoleon, a coffee lover equal to any, then led his countrymen to the domination of Europe, only to fall almost immediately after foolishly banning Paris’s beloved petit noir; he repented, and his dying request was for a cup of St Helena’s espresso. As colonists, the Americans actually made tea illegal. They replaced it with joe (coffee), causing an inevitable power shift that continues today, with Japan, traditionally tea-consuming, now doting on the finest Jamaican Blue Mountain.
Only three times has the West voluntarily dosed itself with mind-altering agents: alcohol starting at an unknown date, caffeine in the seventeenth century and psychedelics in the late twentieth. How alcohol affected early society is impossible to measure, and the jury is still out on psychedelics. But it’s worth noting that coffee (or caffeine) and psychedelics have been associated with strikingly similar cultural revolutions. Richard Steele drinking coffee and talking about reforming the monarchy is the same person as Abbie Hoffman smoking a joint and plotting how to resist the Vietnam War. Voltaire’s caffeinated cynicism was as symptomatic of his era’s favorite buzz as Ginsberg’s was of his. Politically, the human-rights movement of the 1700s (antimonarchical) and the 1900s (civil rights) both came to fruition as their associated pharmacies entered the mainstream. The coffee-crazed mobs of the French Revolution bear a certain resemblance to the pot-addled Vietnam War protesters of the 1960s. All this, by the way, is why American pundits should find consolation in the popularity of drugs like caffeine: despite their negative effects, it indicates Yanks still view getting wired as the preferred state of being. They should reserve their wails for the day when heroin and hot milk become the drugs of choice.
The Devil’s Cup, 2000
Coffee, which makes the politician wise
And see through all things with his half shut eyes
Alexander Pope
Philip Jenkins
Synthetic Panics:
The Symbolic Politics of Designer Drugs – 1
THE CONCEPT OF synthetic drugs is itself problematic, and the term ‘designer drug’ has no precise scientific or sociological meaning. Generally, it refers to a substance synthesized in a laboratory, usually in an attempt to imitate some better-known chemical, to create an analog; the imitation might be undertaken to make the drug cheaper, safer, more effective, or more readily available to a mass public, and the designer phrase is often used to refer to quite legal pharmaceuticals. The popular science press regularly refers to the promise of new designer hormones, designer estrogens, designer genes, and so on. A large portion of modern industry owes its origin to a botched quest for a designer drug, when in 1856, William H. Perkin unsuccessfully attempted to synthesize quinine. He accidentally discovered a mysterious, brightly colored substance, the first of the synthetic aniline dyes that became the basis for the subsequent development of industrial chemistry worldwide; it also made Perkin very rich. In view of the modern stereotype of clandestine drug laboratories run by irresponsible teenagers, it is ironic that this epoch-making innovation was the work of an eighteen-year-old, amateur chemist undertaking an unauthorized experiment.
The discovery of synthetic chemicals marks a turning point in the history of science. Through the first half of the nineteenth century, scientists isolated valuable drugs from various plants, often from ones encountered during European explorations of distant lands. These new substances included morphine, strychnine, quinine, caffeine and codeine, and cocaine itself was isolated in 1844. From the 1860s onwards, a whole pharmacopoeia of revolutionary new synthetic drugs appeared as chemists sought to improve upon these naturally derived substances, as for example when the anesthetic procaine (Novocaine) was created to provide the beneficial effects of cocaine without its drawbacks. In 1898 a new synthetic derivative was claimed to offer the benevolent effects of morphine without the addictive side effects: this was diacetylmorphine, marketed under the trade name of Heroin. And in 1903, the first of the barbiturate drugs became commercially available as a sedative and hypnotic, replacing the alcoholic drinks previously recommended as the best means of calming nerves and
sleeping soundly. All of these substances are synthetic or designer drugs, as are twentieth-century products such as LSD and the whole amphetamine group: all were made not by black-market chemists, but by European pharmaceutical corporations such as Merck, Bayer, Hoechst and Sandoz. The impact of the new drugs was vastly enhanced by the introduction in 1853 of the hypodermic syringe, which permitted substances to be injected directly into the bloodstream.
Though the concept of designer drugs has deep roots, the term is of much more recent origin: it appeared around 1980, after the appearance of the term ‘designer jeans,’ and was initially applied to outré analog substances created and marketed as a kind of synthetic heroin. After this usage was publicized during congressional hearings in 1985, the term was more widely – and unsystematically – applied to other synthetic drugs that came into vogue over the next decade, including MDMA (Ecstasy), fentanyl, methcathinone, GHB and ketamine. Applying the designer label to newer synthetics carried the implication that these substances were ipso facto as lethal as the most notorious synthetic heroins of the early eighties, which incontestably had caused brain damage and even death.
Synthetic Panics: The Symbolic Politics of Designer Drugs, 1999
Antonio Escohotado
New Drugs
AN EXTRAORDINARY DISCOVERY, commercialized during the thirties, was that of certain amines (amphetamine, dexamphetamine, methamphetamine) appearing as products freely sold in pharmacies for nasal congestion, dizziness, obesity, depression, and the treatment of sedative overdoses. They were really stimulants of the nervous system, ten or twenty times more active than cocaine, much cheaper, and capable of not only improving endurance but of considerably improving scores in certain tests such as the intelligence quotient (IQ).
