Drug Usage through the Ages

by Read Listen Learn

Alcohol is deeply embedded in European culture and tradition. Ten thousand-year-old jugs have been discovered in many parts of the world showing traces of strong beer. Since the Ancient Greeks, we have used it not just for pleasure but as the basis of perfumes and medicines. It is at the heart of Christianity, where it is used as part of the most important celebration of Jesus Christ’s promise to humanity of eternal life. What’s more, for hundreds of years, beer and wine were a much healthier alternative to water, which often carried disease, so that children went straight from their mothers’ milk to weak beer. (We should remember that beer contained about 1% alcohol before the nineteenth century, whereas it is typically not less than 4% today.)

Nevertheless, even bearing in mind the lower alcoholic content of beer, it is, perhaps, surprising that every British sailor was allowed about five litres of beer a day and the average Swede drank forty times as much in the seventeenth century as he does now.

But it was in the sixteenth century that spirits were first distilled as a commercial enterprise, although in Scotland and Ireland whisky (or ‘whiskey’ as it is spelt by the Irish) had been made for home consumption for centuries. In fact, at the very beginning of the seventeenth century, the British Parliament passed a law encouraging their production and sale. At this time, ‘jenever’ was distilled from juniper berries in Holland and called ‘geneva’ and, later, gin in England.

The sale of this spirit in Britain jumped from a million litres in 1685 to nearly forty million by 1742, most of it drunk in London alone. One in four houses in the capital sold gin around that time and, luckily perhaps, drunkenness was more socially acceptable than it is today. It was the staple drink of the poor, who used it to manage their long-working days, but was also popular with the rich who alternated it with beer, wine and brandy from France.

This changed soon afterwards though, mainly because of the improving quality and falling prices of beer and greater taxation of gin. However, there were other reasons too: tea and coffee became more widely available and, most importantly, drunkenness was disrupting factory work schedules. There were other social problems too: high crime and child mortality rates were blamed on alcohol consumption. The traditional Christian message that alcohol was one of God’s many gifts to humankind but that excess was the work of the Devil gradually shifted to calls for complete abstinence.

These reached their logical conclusion in the United States in 1919, when the sale of alcohol – but not drinking it – was made a criminal offence. Parts of Canada and Australia also banned alcohol and Scandinavia still has very harsh laws about where and when it can be sold. (For instance, the sale of beer was illegal in Finland until 1989.)

The problem with Prohibition was that most people were never in favour of it. Most famously, in the US the ban on selling alcohol allowed the Mafia and gangsters, such as Al Capone, to make huge profits from importing it from Canada, with all the associated problems this suggests, such as widespread murder and intimidation. Eventually, at the end of 1933, Prohibition ended in America.

Alcohol remains illegal in many Islamic countries today, but also in parts of India, such as Gujarat, the birthplace of Mahatma Gandhi. In 2012, the sale of any drink containing more than 20% alcohol was banned in the Czech Republic because of high rates of alcohol poisoning.

Of course, when we refer to ‘drugs’, controlled ones such as marijuana, cocaine and the opiates, including heroin, as well as party drugs such as ecstasy, come to mind more readily than alcohol. Yet, their use was once as acceptable, if not as widespread, as drink. When tea, coffee and even chocolate were first introduced into Britain, their use was widely debated, as it was not thought proper for civilised people to adopt the habits of barbarian populations (in Asia as well as the Americas). These reservations were overcome as their use was slowly anglicised – such as by mixing tea and coffee with milk and drinking these in places specially catering to their consumption, like coffee houses. There were also social taboos linked to the use of some drugs: women smoking cigarettes was unacceptable, for instance, and upper-class men limited their use of tobacco to certain rooms in the house or the garden so that women would not see them. When Oscar Wilde walked onstage in London smoking in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the audience thought it outrageous.

Yet, at the same time, the British never tried to interfere with local customs in distant parts of their empire. Dr. Johnson, the writer of the first dictionary in English, saw no difference between the average Londoner with his gin and the Turk with his opium pipe, and the smoking of hashish and opium was tolerated all over India.

In fact, hashish, cocaine and opium were accepted in Britain until after the First World War, when drugs became associated with prostitution. They had had a long and socially acceptable history in the country. For instance, a little-known fact is that sticking plasters to stop bleeding and prevent wounds from becoming dirty were soaked in marijuana (both to clean cuts and reduce pain) until 1925.

Humphry Davy, the late eighteenth century scientist responsible for discovering more chemical elements than anybody before or since, used nitrous oxide (or laughing gas) throughout his life. In fact, it killed him eventually, as he had anticipated it would many of his patients if he were ever to introduce them to it. Yet, Davy, along with his friends, such as Dr. Roget (who wrote the thesaurus that bears his name), the great poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and many others consumed huge quantities of opium and nitrous oxide.

Ether and chloroform were soon added to the list and, although these had the added benefit that from the 1850s they were used in surgical anaesthesia, they were also standard aids to conjuring up a party atmosphere for students. Of course, Davy and his more intellectual friends did not only use these gases for a laugh. Davy was appalled when he asked a patient to whom he had just administered nitrous oxide how he felt and got the reply that he didn’t exactly know, except that it was strange. As Davy saw the drug as a means to greater psychic exploration and enriched appreciation of music, this was rather less than he had expected.

In the case of opiates, Coleridge saw them as encouraging a willing suspension of reality, an escape from a fast-industrialising landscape and the increasing management of his and everybody else’s time by a mechanistic new social order – in short, a way of dealing with the speed of change.

If anaesthetic drugs and opium and its derivatives were the drugs of choice among sections of the intellectual elite in Britain, the French were more preoccupied with hashish. This made its way into France for the first time after Napoleon’s military campaigns in North Africa. Its use was consolidated in 1830 by the French invasion of Algeria. Just as Coleridge saw opium as an escape from a life he did not understand and did not want to, Gustave Flaubert, the grand old man of French literature and author of the novel, ‘Madame Bovary’, loved hashish. He saw it as coming from a primitive society that had somehow hung on to the simplicity of life that was vanishing forever in France.

Of course, Coleridge and Flaubert were not the only artists interested in drugs. Edgar Allan Poe (who used absolutely everything), Jack London (who preferred whisky) and Wilkie Collins (who wrote and relaxed with laudanum (opium mixed with a strong wine called sherry, cinnamon, cloves and saffron) all bear witness to the popularity of drugs that today are seen as dangerous and are illegal nearly everywhere in the world. And let’s not forget Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, who used cocaine regularly every morning and evening for the insights it gave him into his unconscious self.

Almost all the drugs that we regard nowadays as dangerous – except for those like LSD and Ecstasy which were only synthesised and popularised in the twentieth century – had, then, been tolerated in the eighteenth and, especially, the nineteenth centuries. As an example, cocaine, which was introduced into Britain in the 1880s, was accepted to the extent that the most popular fictional character of the time, Sherlock Holmes, was a regular user and thought none the worse for that. The question is what happened to change the situation so that, soon after the First World War, they were all criminalised. The answer is simple. While drugs were used by the upper class they were accepted, but as soon as they became popular among the working class, everything changed. In 1906, dancers from the States brought cocaine over to England and soon it became associated with the seamier side of life: promiscuity and drugs became two sides of the same coin. What was tolerated among the intellectual upper class could not be overlooked among the poor and legislation soon followed.

Since that time, despite the recommendations of numerous government reports, drugs have been illegal and people have been fined or imprisoned for making choices about what they do with their own bodies.