Dan Snow's History Hit - The Cocaine Craze in Victorian Britain

Episode Date: August 18, 2024

Many things may come to mind when you hear the word 'cocaine' - and we'd wager that the last thing on that list would be the Victorians. But as it turns out, the Victorians were avid cocaine users, whether it be to remedy ailments and injuries, give them an edge in competitive sports or simply put a bit of pep in their step. A hundred years later, it is amongst the most criminalised substances on earth.Dr Douglas Small is a historian of medicine and author of Cocaine, Literature, and Culture, 1876-1930. He joins us today to take us through the deeper history of cocaine and explain how it went from a central feature of Incan cultural life to the defining party drug of the modern day.Produced by James Hickmann, and edited by Dougal Patmore and Max Carrey.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off for 3 months using code ‘DANSNOW’.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. Last year I was in southern Peru, I was right on the edge of the Andes and I visited a small museum in which there was an ice mummy. There was a 12 year old victim of human sacrifice, she was killed probably around the beginning of the 16th century. She was an Inca, she was killed at the height of the Inca Empire. And I watched the team carry out some routine checks and she was removed from the deep freeze unit in which she was being stored. And I had to briefly carry her from one area to the next while the curators were busy with some scientific equipment. And I was so struck by the fact that she was the same age and size and not far off the same weight as my 12-year-old girl. and size and not far off the same weight as my 12-year-old girl.

It was one of the most intense experiences of my life. 500 years old, a near-perfectly preserved young Inca woman. And you can listen to all that happening if you go back and listen to my series on the Inca, which went out earlier this year. But one of the things that particularly interested me was that her state of preservation was so good that even the contents of her stomach has survived and we can see what she had eaten and consumed just before she was killed on the mountaintop in that act of human sacrifice and it turns out that her stomach was pretty empty all there was in there was some chicha which is roughly a kind of fermented a a beer, and some coca leaves. So the people with her

managed to get her up to that dizzying altitude on a diet of beer and coca leaves, which is a stimulant. It's the plant from which scientists would refine cocaine. So this episode is about the history of cocaine, particularly I think of the history of cocaine's leap from the Andes, where the coca leaf had been chewed for generations, for centuries, and still is chewed, to North America and the global north. Our perception of cocaine today, I think, is one of a late 20th century drug, the party drug in America and Europe, a character from so many of those classic Hollywood films. We associate it with either the ultra-violent and erotic or perhaps

the risk-taking neoliberal captains of capitalism in the 1980s. But all of that obscures a deeper history of cocaine. The way the Incas used the coca leaf to suppress hunger, to give themselves increased vigour, to worship their gods, then its first adoption by Europeans. In this episode, I'm going to trace that journey from its organic, semi-divine, even romanticised past through Sherlock Holmes, who became a keen user in the Victorian period, and how it became the epitome of the modern. It was in every remedy and medicine available, nearly, in the late 19th century. And only gradually, culminating in its ban in the UK during the First World War, did it come to be seen as a scourge.

It's a fascinating topic and I've got Douglas Small, he's a lecturer in 19th century literature and he spent his career looking at the cultural reception of medicine and science and drug use over the last, well, 200 or so years. And he's just written Cocaine, Liter cocaine literature and culture 1876 to 1930 so folks if you want to hang out she don't lie it's cocaine on the pod enjoy not cocaine obviously just listening to it's fascinating history t-minus 10 atomic bombs dropped on hir. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff, and the shuttle has cleared the tower.

Douglas, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. It's great to be here, Dan. Cocaine comes from the coca leaf, does it? And that is South American? Yep. So the coca leaf is, it's sort of a little like shrub bush looking thing. It's not actually a particularly charismatic, I guess you could say, looking plant. It usually grows to be about sort of seven to eight feet tall, little white flowers that turn into red berries.

It's a very unremremarkable plant given how important it is like culturally and like scientifically for the world and what was its use when europeans arrived was it in was it in use as a stimulant so it absolutely was the first sort of european contact of it comes via the spanish conquest of south america but prior to the arrival of Europeans, it had been used across large parts of Central and South America for about 8,000 years prior to that. It's particularly significant culturally and religiously for the Incan Empire. So the Spanish and other European travellers are immediately realising this is part of Incan culture and life and diet.

Definitely. So it's very culturally and very religiously significant to the Incan people. It's kept in state-run storage facilities and it's handed out to labourers on state projects throughout the Incan Empire. It's given to sacrificial victims. It's often used as a religious offering and it's a rite. It's been suggested by some scholars that the

need to find areas that are more suitable for the cultivation of the coca plant is part of what drives Incan expansion into the areas to the north and to the east of Cusco. And it's cosmologically quite important because there's a character in Incan religion called Mama Coca, who's a sort of divine embodiment of the spirit of the coca leaf and is also broadly associated with health and with happiness. And is it like tea in China? Is coca immediately recognized as a cash crop, as an exciting new import in this age of dietary enrichment that's going on in Europe at the time? I mean, is it brought over quite rapidly? So it actually isn't. The Spanish Empire initially are very, very wary of coca and view it as a superstition, particularly, as I said, because it has that connection with Incan religious ritual. Initially, the Spanish empire are very keen to

suppress its use, but ultimately it's just so deeply ingrained in the life of the place that it's very hard to thoroughly dissuade people from using it. And eventually, the Spanish sort of come on board with this and decide that actually it's very useful to keep using it in the same kind of way as the Incan state had, to allow laborers to use it to ameliorate hunger, to act as a stimulant, to allow them to work longer hours and for less food than they would otherwise be able to do. Is it used in Europe or is it the chemical revolutions of the 19th century that turn it into something Europeans want to take? 19th century that turn it into something Europeans want to take? So it takes a surprising while to make its way across the Atlantic into Europe.

Initially, it's mostly reported very sporadically by Spanish, sometimes Italian observers in the new world as just this kind of curiosity that people take. It's sometimes spoken about in poetry, sometimes mentioned in in literature but it's really only in the 19th century that it begins to start like making its way into day-to-day use of consumption in europe and even then it's really only in the kind of 1870s that it properly takes off isn't that weird though because coffee and tea and sugar and pepper and nutmeg i mean the europeans were mad for all this stuff. Why coca so slow? I mean, partly I think it's because coca doesn't travel particularly well.

The leaves tend to go off in transit quite a lot. And so it's usually confined to first-hand accounts of people in South America describing it. There's one particularly colourful account that gets bandied about afterwards that comes from a former British soldier called William Miller, who has served under Wellington in the Napoleonic Wars. And when peace breaks out in Europe, he decides, well, I may as well go to South America and join up with Simon Bolivar. And so while he's over there, he writes later in his memoirs some accounts of coca use among the bolivian soldiers he experiments with using it himself he claims because because good english cigars are not a luxury readily available to the patriot army whether or not that's just his excuses

he doesn't really get into it but that that's certainly an account which sort of catches on in Britain and introduces English-speaking peoples to what to them seems like this strange kind of South American curiosity. So the extraordinary Edward Payson Weston, who loses a bet, he lost a bet on the 1860 US presidential election. I learned from your work. The loser had to walk from Boston to Washington, DC. He's nearly 500 miles and he did it in 10 days, a little over 10 days. And he decided to chew coca leaves. Yeah. So he probably didn't chew coca leaves on the Boston to Washington walk, but this is really what gets him his start as a sort of sporting celebrity. And he comes to dominate the world of

this very strange Victorianorian sport which is essentially competitive long distance walking this sounds remarkable to us now but the victorians absolutely went mad for this when weston comes over having solidified his sort of reputation in the united states with initially as you say that that long distance walk to see the presidential inauguration in Washington. And then his sporting career takes off in America after that. When he moves over to Britain, something like 5,000 people turn up to the London Agricultural Hall to see him compete in his first race against the England championship walker called William Perkins. And it's during that race that he is subsequently revealed to have been chewing

coca and that's actually what really like moves coca for british people from being something that's occasionally discussed in travelers tales something that's kind of mentioned every now and again in accounts of life in south america to being something that people are really interested in and actively like as you say almost for a while becomes like tea and coffee, something that people really want to use in their daily lives. And are they using coca or are they using the refined, Europeanized? And does that become cocaine? What's the history of the substance itself? By this point, I think the big thing that's changed is that transport of coca has become a lot easier.

Steamships now mean that you can move it much more quickly from South America, certainly to the United States of America, and then over to Britain. So the availability of the leaves is a lot more. And once the demand is there for them, then people start actively to pursue importing them in a way that they hadn't previously. So there's a period in mid to late Victorian Britain and parts of Europe where people are now chewing coca leaves like Andeans have been doing for centuries. Absolutely.

There's accounts which come out of this period of describing the fact that Mincing Lane, which is the centre of the sort of herb and spice trade in London, has basically become besieged by people looking to buy these leaves, which up until now have been a kind of a rarity, have hardly been imported at all. And very quickly after Weston popularises their use, they catch on amongst all kinds of sportsmen they start being advertised for bicyclists other pedestrians there are accounts that are written the british medical journal people talk about how great it is for like

shooting parties because they apparently like help to stabilize your nerves and like just give you a little bit more sense of like pep and confidence which people say makes them much better shots there's accounts of them being given to racehorses to kind of even out their the temperament of like difficult horses before races it becomes like a kind of cottage industry there's a real boom in them in the 1870s early 1880s but people at this point are still chewing just regular coca leaves. It's just the importation of that. Cocaine as a substance doesn't really kick off until a few years later in 1884. And is that because it's being put through the European chemical industry, which is achieving all sorts of remarkable firsts

at this period? Yeah. So the sort of backstory to this is that cocaine had first been extracted from coca leaves in the 1860s, but no one really knows what to do with this stuff. Cocaine is orders of magnitude stronger and more concentrated in its effects than raw coca leaves. And there's a thought initially that it might be useful as a stimulant. Sigmund Freud, for example, is someone who early on in his career famously writes several articles, one called Uber Coca, about using cocaine for potentially, again, as a stimulant, kind of tragically for some of its later effects. He also recommends that it might be a great therapy for morphine addiction which has

become increasingly a problem at this time not to spoil it for people it doesn't actually work out as brilliantly as freud had hoped but no one really knows what this stuff is is good for and that changes though in 1884 when a friend of sigmund freud's called car caller who's another young ambitious viennese doctor discovers that it can be used as the first effective local anesthetic and that's what really precipitates it from being just some weird useless alkaloid as one like paper describes it later to being like something that is essential and very central to medical science for the next several decades and so it's is it injected or rubbed on the skin or what how's that asking for a friend

how can you perform at local operations so to answer your friend's question the the way it's used in surgery is generally as like a topical application in some kind of solution the the reason this is so momentous right is because color discovers that it can be used particularly for eye surgery prior to this you have other general anesthetics like chloroform and ether and they've like been very revolutionary very effective technologies in their own right but they have certain very clear limitations and one of them is for surgery on the eye. You can't use general anaesthetics really to perform surgery on people's eyes because if people are unconscious, their eyes roll around. Unconscious movements make it very difficult to control when you're doing these very difficult

delicate surgeries on people's eyes. Also, when people come out from under general anaestheticsics you tend to have things like post-operative vomiting and stuff which can damage the delicate surgical work that's just been done on them so having a local anesthetic that you can just drop onto someone's eye and it'll numb the surface is incredibly useful and it also then gets used very very quickly in all sorts of other applications it can be used almost anywhere that there's like mucous membranes so surgeries on your nose surgery on the lips tongue throat things like that part of what makes it so kind of transformative and so like inspiring to people all the time is that it feels like you've had this moment where you the medical profession is going oh oh, we've conquered pain.

You had ether and you had chloroform and they were good, but they were potentially dangerous. You can sometimes die under general anesthetic, obviously, which is a very disconcerting prospect for people at this time. So now surgery feels like it's moved into this new modern era where pain has been dispensed with. We can just drop the cocaine onto the surface of the body and pain is gone. In this and Dan Snow's history, we're talking about cocaine. More coming up, figuratively.

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Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. And then I suppose, as we have seen in our lifetime, it's a short hop from medical use, from pain mitigation to recreational. And I asked this to someone who just recently listened to the complete works of Sherlock Holmes of my very young children and was surprised that I'd forgotten

about various drug-taking moments in it. And one of which I think was in The Sign of Four, when he said it was so transcendentally stimulating i think it was or clarifying and homes sherlock homes he smokes opium he uses morphine but also he's a cocaine user as well absolutely and it's it's cocaine that becomes like homes's drug of choice you might say say. Like, Gondal does mention earlier on that he sometimes takes morphine as well. But then, weirdly, I mean, cocaine is the one that keeps getting mentioned and comes back in various other stories. And the reason that he chooses to make Holmes a cocaine user is because of this kind of incredible technological cachet that it has at the time. because of this kind of incredible technological cachet that it has at the time.

Cocaine feels like a new, profoundly transformative technology. It feels modern. It feels incredibly innovative. And so when you have a character like Holmes, who's invested in scientific knowledge, who's like a cutting-edge technological detective, it's sometimes suggested that he is in himself a kind of slightly technological human being that he's almost a kind of slightly artificial slightly mechanical feeling human being watson at one point compares him to an automaton and it says are you you're you're such a kind of incredible thinking machine homes you have no emotions at all the use of cocaine is bound up with that because like it makes him feel like a modern technologized person i love that and in the same way that when i was younger and read kind of cheap i guess you'd call them spy like pulp spy fiction so a lot of

the assassins were these sort of uber mensch who would like use speed to kind of heighten their awareness all through the day and night and banish sleep and all that kind of stuff it felt sort of dangerously modern in some ways yeah and that's that's the kind of flip side of it that like early on cocaine still feels like the new it feels like something which is cutting edge something that people are very proud of and In some ways, that's a fortunate coincidence of timing that this discovery of Karl Kohler's is made in 1884, early 1885. The 20th century is just beginning to come into people's view. People are thinking culturally about all of the big technological changes that have happened since the dawn of the 19th century,

how we've gone from the sailing ship to the steamship, how we've gone from the goose quill to the typewriter. And now it feels like just as the 20th century is beginning to come into view, we finally conquered pain. It feels like this is a great symbol for Victorian industry and Victorian science more broadly. When does the backlash begin? When does society start seeing cocaine as a scourge? It's quite unexpected because reports of cocaine addiction and the really disturbing, distressing effects of that begin to come out in the press very early, like as early as 1885, you start to see reports of it. But what's strange, I think, to a modern eye is that that's sort of viewed as a tragedy, but that cocaine is still seen as an incredibly important innovation.

And so the backlash actually takes a lot longer to develop than you would think. It's really only around about 1916 and the early 1920s that serious moves are made towards controlling and criminalizing this substance. And the main factor which in Britain precipitates that kind of move towards increasing controls of cocaine is actually the First World War. Whitesprboro says that you have to cultivate a feeling of national readiness, of national preparedness, that you can't have soldiers who are off duty potentially taking this drug to amuse themselves. You can't have civilian populations using potentially addictive drugs in their downtime because the civilian population exists to support this national endeavor in warfare so in 1916 the government introduces this amendment to the defense of the realm act

which for the first time begins to limit sale of cocaine to authorized persons and begins to kind of control who can own it who can use it and begins to sort of provide the legal framework to what are eventually going to morph into our current drug laws. And presumably this is also an era of temperance, of prohibition. Is there a sense that actually cocaine, far from being a wonder drug, is just another, well, curse, like alcohol, like opium, inimical to our health? So, again, it is quite strange because there's a famous quote which describes it as the third scourge of mankind

alongside opium and alcohol. But at the same time, it's quite odd from our point of view that it does continue to be venerated and celebrated for as long as it is. Even into the late 20s there are still medical scientists chemists people in specialized professions who are saying i actually know this is incredibly valuable and really like the more attempts to control this and this has actually come with bad for us because we we depend on using this drug for so many therapeutic and so many useful medical

processes. Also, who is buying this? I mean, recreationally, is it elite? Now when you go to Victorian towns across the country, the great laugh is, look at this cough syrup with cocaine in it or something. Is this something that was finding its way into normal families up and down the UK? Absolutely. Like cocaine, it starts out as a kind of specialized tool of surgery, but very, very quickly it explodes into popular usage. There's one article from the end of 1885 that's basically looking at doing a kind of survey of cocaine at the end of the first year of its use. And the conclusion of this article is that there's already been so many potential applications for this published that it can't actually cover them all. So cocaine very, very quickly, like, it finds its way into everything, almost dozens of kind of day-to-day remedies. It is used in

cold and flu remedies are one of the most popular ones hay fever cures seasickness tablets incidentally it's also widely used for morning sickness and pregnancy almost any day-to-day household remedy that you can think of nowadays the victorians like use cocaine in it because it is such a useful painkiller from their point of view. And what about as a party drug? I mean, is this something you see in the 60s and beyond? People start talking about all-night dancing, that kind of stuff. Do you see this in the swinging 1890s or even in the 1920s?

Oh, absolutely. So it does catch on and move from being something that's used medically to something that's being used recreationally. And that starts to happen probably in the 1890s. And prior to this, the main way you would have used cocaine is probably through injection or even sometimes drinking it in a liquid solution but what really sort of precipitates the move in towards it being as you say kind of a party drug is the fact that it begins to be mixed up by chemists into cocaineized snuffs and these initially are used as cold and flu remedies cocaine as well as its kind of stimulant function is actually quite useful because it's a vasoconstrictor

and so it's a painkiller and a stimulant as well which actually means that it's from a certain point of view i should stress kind of ideal as a cold and flu remedy and that is what gradually begins to sort of move it into the realm of as you say being a bit more of a party drug a recreational compound in the early part of the 20th century, so around about the early 1900s, these coconized snuffs begin to become more and more available. Magazines start publishing recipes for people to mix their own coconized snuffs at home if they prefer to mix them up themselves rather than buy one from a chemist. And that begins to shift

who's using the drug and for what it begins to move out of people prior to this who could afford to let's say for instance buy syringes to buy cocaine from chemists for injecting it begins to move into a less wealthy population of users and that's part of what drives the move towards legislative control of it there's a certain amount of hypocrisy built into like early attempts to legislate and control cocaine where when its use was confined to white middle class upper middle class men principally or even just to sort of reasonably affluent white subjects in general it's much less concerning to the general population once it begins to permeate into poor non-white populations

suddenly there's a kind of a swell of concern around the compound it begins to become a kind of vehicle for people to sort of latch onto. And actually, the anxieties about cocaine use are actually anxieties that are occasioned by those populations. The fear of racially minoritized or economically minoritized peoples, whether or not their enjoyment of this drug can be seen as legitimate compared with the enjoyment of their social superiors. It's prohibited in 1916 during the First World War. There is a drug scene, isn't there, in the 1920s. But on the whole, would you argue that the prohibition was quite successful?

I mean, through the rest of the 20th century, unless I'm being very naive, cocaine was not used by large swathes of the British population. So I think it is absolutely effective in, for a while anyway, limiting its usage. One major factor which I think is observable, certainly in the way in which the move towards drug prohibition is reported in the British press is it feels sometimes like there wasn't a great anticipation of the technological changes that would happen to make the production of these kinds of drugs much easier throughout the 20th century. There's often this sort of rhetoric that you see cropping up in newspapers in the late 1910s the 1920s which seems to suggest that it's impossible to produce these kinds of chemicals without large national industrial infrastructure they would need enormous factories enormous plantations

to do this and as we know what had changes throughout the 20th century is that these production processes become much easier. It becomes possible for criminals to not only take control of illegal distribution networks for these drugs, but also to take control of the production side of it as well. And I would suggest that from a purely practical point of view, that's something which was underestimated in the framing of some of those legislations. So what's the legacy? If we look from the introduction of the late Victorian through to its prohibition and slightly beyond, what do you think is the legacy of cocaine in how we see it and its use? I would say that one of the most important social legacies of cocaine is it provides a very direct dramatization of how drug laws,

which initially start out with a very well-founded sense of concern for the very real health dangers that these drugs represent as addictive and harmful substances can very quickly morph into expressing underlying racial and social anxieties. And I think that's something which in some ways continues into our modern drug legislation, that the legacy of cocaine is partly about illustrating the incredible benefit that modern pharmacology has for our lives the ways in which it can revolutionize surgery and make our lives better but also the ways in which in some ways it encourages us to express our worst anxieties and our worst fears about poor populations, about non-white populations, and about the kind of pleasures that we view them as being able to legitimately enjoy.

Who gets to enjoy cocaine and who gets to be forgiven for enjoying it, I think, is something that we as a society are still wrestling with. You say that again. Douglas, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Tell everyone what your book is called. Thank you very much. The book is called Cooking, Literature and Culture, 1876 to 1930. Go and get it, everybody. Thank you very much indeed.

Thank you very much. you