In Our Time - Drugs

Episode Date: May 23, 2002

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of drugs. Throughout history people have taken them to alter their perceptions and change their moods. The attractions lie in the promise of instant pleasure and the possibility of heightened perceptions. Nietzsche said that no art could exist without intoxication and believed that a dream-like state was an essential precondition to superior vision and understanding. But artists and writers from De Quincey to Coleridge to Huxley have found drugs to be both a creative and a destructive force in their lives and work. Coleridge said in his poem about opium: Fantastic Passions! Maddening Brawl! And shame and terror over all! The world of drugs is a topsy-turvy world of ambivalence and paradox: a world of clarity and confusion; stimulation and stupefaction; medicine and poison; vitality and death.Can drugs really stimulate creativity? What is the impact of drugs on the body? And what role have narcotics and stimulants played in the history of medicine? With Richard Davenport-Hines, historian and author of The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Narcotics; Sadie Plant, author of Writing on Drugs; Mike Jay, historian and author of Emperors of Dreams, Drugs in the Nineteenth Century.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, throughout history, people have taken drugs to alter their perceptions and change their moods. The attractions lie in the promise of instant pleasure,

the possibility of heightened perception or simulated oblivion. Nietzsche said that no art could exist without intention. intoxication. He believed that a dream-like state was an essential precondition to superior vision and understanding. Scientists such as Humphry Davy experimented with drugs, so did Freud. But artists and writers from De Quincey to Coleridge to Huxley have found drugs to be both a creative and a destructive force in their lives and work. Coleridge said in his poem about opium, fantastic passions, maddening brawl and shame and terror overall. The world of drugs is a world of ambivalence and paradox. It's a of clarity and confusion, stimulation and stupefaction, medicine and poison, vitality and death.

Can drugs really stimulate creativity? That's what we're going to talk about. What's the impact of drugs on the mind? Are we talking about a special relationship where medicine becomes a positive stimulant for some scientists and artists? With me to discuss the history of drugs are Richard Davenport Hines, historian and author of The Pursuit of Oblivion, a social history of drugs. Sadie Plant, writer and author of writing on drugs. and Mike Jay, historian and author of Emperors of Dreams, Drugs in the 19th century. Mike Jay, just to begin with what could be called the most common drug in this country,

well, the second most common, the first being cigarettes, as it were, alcohol. You've said that Western civilization was founded on alcohol. That's quite a statement. Yes, it is. But I think it's fair to say that unlike many other cultures on this planet, European civilization has had alcohol as its indigenous drug for a very long time. time, certainly since the classical era of Greece and Rome. Greek civilization, particularly, is very much characterized by alcohol and by the building of a complex cultural matrix around alcohol,

all kinds of cultural traditions of song and dance. Alcohols also use as a base for sophisticated preparations like medicines and perfumes. And classical culture is much more built around a model of alcohol and this is the model which permeates through to sort of the early historical period in Europe where of course alcohol then becomes enshrined in Christianity as its central sacrament and of course there are many parts of Britain and Europe where water is not very good to drink and people habitually for generations and centuries moved straight on from mother's milk to beer or wine or cider. So I think in that sense we can say

it's our indigenous drug. Let's move into the sort of drugs that we're going to talk about mainly from this programme. When 17th century triages and travellers began bringing back the drugs of tobacco, tea, cocoa, coffee and opium, how are these commodities received? It's very interesting.

It's really with the discovery of the new world opens up, you know, an enormous number of things. But one of the things it opens up is new drugs. It seems odd. States to talk about tea and coffee and chocolate as drugs. But that's certainly how they were perceived. They were very controversial. There was a lot of debate about whether they were good for you or bad for you

and whether it was proper to adopt the savage habits of inferior races and so on. All of those substances, tea, coffee, chocolate, tobacco were all actually prohibited at different times in different places or else. only permitted to be used by certain groups of people. And it was, in every case, decades before they were broadly accepted into our culture. And what really enabled them to be accepted into our culture in every case was some way of customising or commodifying them so that they came to seem like products of our culture, tea, coffee, chocolate.

We added milk and sugar to them that had never been done where they came from. We made them into other different things. New institutions like coffee shops, for example, started up to give a new context for this new thing. Social codes evolved around tobacco who was allowed to smoke and who wasn't and where you smoked

and where you didn't. And it was only once these things were sort of gradually customised so they fitted into our culture that they really took off. Richard Davenport Heights, what did the British travellers make of the foreign drugs? What were their

moral attitudes when they saw people taking these drugs that they were foreign to them? And what were the moral attitudes? It's quite striking how unaggressive their assumptions of culture superiority are. They're very tolerant about a third world drug taking. Samuel Johnson typifies the attitude when he says that there's an absolute moral equivalence between an idiot Englishman stupefying himself with the gin and an idiot Turk stupefying himself. with opium. And indeed, that attitude continues well into the 20th century.

The officials who are one in the British Empire think that it would be culturally very aggressive and quite inappropriate to interfere with the Indian hemp or the opium habits of people in the Indian Empire. One of the initial interests was that it was in the medicinal value of opium. I mean, famously said by Thomas Sidenham, he declared that many... and would be useless without opium?

Yes, he's particularly infatuated with it as a drug. And, of course, the history is full of physicians who have a sometimes unhealthy enthusiasm for particular drug. Dr. Brown in the 18th century ruins his life by promoting opium and consuming it himself lavishly. But, I mean, it's very important to stress how all the substances that are now so controversial and controlled and illicit,

were staples of medicine for thousands of years into the 20th century. Yes, and in this country until about 1925, 1926, the little padding you have under what's now called the Lasterplast was always soaked in marijuana as a disinfectant and as a numb it. So the culling of foreign drugs were partly pleasure, but there were certainly medicinal values seized on eagerly by Sondman and used regularly by everybody. There are opium pills, there are opium, this opium,

all sorts of pain. Wilberforce took opium pills three times a day. So on and on it went as a medicinal. Because it's extraordinarily good drug and still is. Heroin is the most wonderful drug in medicine today. People like to call it diacetyl morphine to hide the fact that it's heroin. It's a most gentle piece of the pharmaceutical armour for many ill people. So did Plano, how widespread was the use of opium becoming in the 18th century?

And how much was known in those early days about its addictive qualities? I think not so much was known about its addictive qualities at that period. And it's quite true everything that you've been saying so far, that I think opium in particular, as we know, it still does remain a real staple of modern medicine. Not only in the form of heroin, but codeine and all of those other preparations, it really runs right through medicine now. And in a very similar way, it played that kind of role in everyday working class life

and certainly towards the end of the 18th century in the beginning of the 19th century. It seems, I mean, you find reports of, for example, working people taking a couple of grains of opium in the evening or mothers using it to keep babies quiet. I mean, again, practices which now would seem really extraordinary and, you know, quite unacceptable. And it went through the classes, didn't it? It really does seem to run all the way through different classes. I mean, at one end, we have characters like Coaloridge and De Quincey really using these substances in very sort of intellectual ways. And as I say, at the other end, we've got the mill workers, the factory workers of that new industrial revolution using these substances as both, you know, means to escape,

but also just, you know, ways of getting through the working week, I think. To bring it now, as we're going to, I hope, to create a brightness and that. But just before we move to that, what was the connection between interest in Orientalism, particularly, interest in the East as a culture, as something mysterious, rich, foreign, to be envied, tempting and so on. Did that lead them towards the drugs? Was it the other way around? Yeah, no, it's a very interesting question.

I think it really is one of those fascinating chicken and egg questions that you can never quite decide ultimately. But of course, you know, with this whole colonial exploration to the new world and across Asia, you know, there was obviously a great new interest in, you know, what suddenly were these new exotic parts of the world that had become accessible through, works of art or design, fabrics, you know, a whole new range of textures and colours as well as

tastes and experiences come into the West. And in that respect I think obviously many writers and artists, you know, were looking to participate, if you like, in this kind of Eastern experience as they saw it, by using certain drugs. So one could say that when they, in turn, you know, seem to have various kind of Arabesque or Chinese type visions or experiences that they are really, you know, finding what they're looking for already. But of course, at the same time, it's very possible to say, well, by consuming those substances, you know, perhaps they were participating in a culture which had itself been shaped by its use of those drugs. And so if you have stories like, for example, the Arabian Nights, which obviously had a great fascination,

especially in France, where hashish was really the drug of the moment through the Napoleonic campaigns, bringing it back into France, there you have a question, you know, is it the drug that has really informed the very distributed, quite novel sort of formulation of that text from a Western point of view, or is it the case that the Western drug users when taking the drug are really hoping that they're going to find themselves in that world

and therefore do? Richard Dunmorehound, I find it fascinating in your book. One of the things you argued was the taking up of drugs in the 18th century, late 17th, 18th century, was part of an advancing desire, you might say, to examine the self. and self-identity. Can you talk about that with regard to drugs and then with regard to the way the romantic writers took it up?

Yes. The idea that in England we can trace back to John Locke, which is that one shouldn't think of one's identity as something tied down by one's surname or one's family, but one's identity comprises the accumulation of one's emotional experiences. That's a very minority view, a very privileged view, until I suppose, the 1830s or so. but after then it takes off the young members of the romantic movement like Charles Nodier in France and the Quincy in England both start using laudanum

which is a compound of opium and wine recreationally and aesthetically for example to enhance their appreciation of music and also because they're interested in mood-altering substances in changing how they feel as a way of making themselves more imaginative and that they think more talented. But the idea is that there is an inner self,

Thomas Rehearn, quote, my secret and close self, 1684, I think that was, and that the idea of exploring it and looking to it and feeding it becomes an important part of the romantic thrust. Is this, Mike Jay, is this something that you think De Quinti, De Quince was driving De Quincey in his use of opium? I think what's interesting is that we associate drugs with the romantic movement,

but actually they were just starting to become very important to the era before. They were starting to be seen as part of an enlightenment program to understand the mind and how it works and how the higher functions of the mind, like the imagination, for example, can be influenced by material causes. Interesting, because I must have assumed the basic assumption was that we were chemical and chemical input would change the chemistry and therefore the mind itself and therefore influence not in the way we thought but all the combinations including imagination.

Yes, well the I mean I think the most interesting group to look at here is the Bristol Circle who start experimenting with nitrous oxide laughing gas in 1799. So this is Coleridge working together with Humphrey Davy who's a young chemist at this point, Thomas Beddow's a doctor, other poets like Sothe and so on. And what they've discovered is that if you take large amounts of nitrous oxide, you have extraordinary experiences where your imagination runs wild and you seem to get in touch with what, you know, in the later romantic generation will be called the sublime. So what you've got here is kind of a cusp of the end of the Enlightenment

and the beginning of the romantic story, because you've got people pursuing this because they want to find out how it is that a material chemical cause can manifest the sublime. But then they have to figure out how to talk about it. And they discover quite early on there's a wonderful moment

where Davy gives a lot of nitrous oxide to one of his patients in Bristol and says, well, how do you feel? And the chap says, well, I do not know, but very queer. And Davy is distressed that is the best that we can come up with for describing, explaining what's going on inside our heads. So he and the poets get together in this search for what they call a language of feeling.

And Dr. Roger of theesaurus is part of this circle as well. And they get very interested in the idea that we might actually have to invent a new language to talk about what's going on inside our heads. Or perhaps what we could do is use old words we're familiar with, but use them in new ways and sort of metaphors and open up this hidden self. which is starting to be revealed by drugs. So yes, as you say, that becomes a watchword of the romantic era. But it really starts, I think, earlier as an enlightenment search for material causes for states of mind.

I'm glad you about Dabian, because he's almost on the cusp, isn't he? He's almost the transition, sort of scientifically. But do you think, as well, I'm reading with your Sedi Planted, when De Quincey was taking drugs coming from a different thing, wasn't it? because he was, I mean, let's assume they took him because he liked them. But also the pace of change, you talk about industrialisation, he talks about everything changing too much, the world going too fast, there'd be no space to dream, he wanted a chance to dream,

and in these dreams of opium, one sees through these wonderful, I'm afraid, seductive passages. You have particularly recollections of infancy, which mattered a lot to him, matter to a lot of the romantics or something. Can you talk a bit about that? De Quincey and his generation, I think that's, Early 19th century generations, again, this would go across the classes. It wouldn't just be a matter for the sort of intellectual classes. But I think at this period of traumatic change, of the railways being introduced,

for example, people having a whole variety of experiences that were completely outside their past experience, the landscape being ravaged, new factory systems. I mean, so many changes that even now we talk about, you know, technical revolutions happening. But presumably then the psychological effect must have been quite profound. And it seems to me that right across the classes, you can see people, especially using the opiates, as a kind of compensation. I mean, I talk about it in my book as a kind of travel sickness pill, really, some way of dealing with these enormous speeds of change. De Quincey, as you say, he often points out that he almost can't think about how fast things are moving. He can't remember what was happening just a few years ago.

Things seem to be moving too fast to him. And I think on this deeper, more sort of unconscious level across the culture, you know, Britain in particular, British society is turning to these drugs in this period in order to deal with this great period of transition. Would you, say, that originally, Devin, one time? I hugely agree, but I can talk about it in terms of what happened in France, perhaps. The French start conquering Algerian 1830 and Hashi starts coming in to Parisian society, who is in Bohemia almost immediately

and is used by people like Flobeau and Baudelaire and many others. Flobeau is quite explicit and he's disgusted by 19th century industrialisation. Hashish is seen as coming from a primitive culture as seen as repudiation of that sort of competitive organised life that the artistic mind rebels against. But of course the irony. is that for the Western world, the two things are two sides of one coin, aren't there?

Colonialism and industrialisation really are two sides of one coin, and they would not have had the one without the other. Can we just turn to Coleridge from him? Because when people think of drugs in literature, they think of the Quincy, the confession of opium meter, and of course of coleridge with his battles with drugs. He said many things. He talked of his opiated dreams. He said, we choose to be deceived.

And was that somehow transferred into that great insight about the suspension of disbelief? Do you think, Sanjewatt? I think it was. I mean, I think this is a constant theme throughout Coleridge's work. And he talks about this idea of choosing to be deceived, both in the context of using opium, but also, of course, in the context of literature and in particular drama and the experience of being present, for example, in a theatre,

and of leaving your judgment at the door, the willing suspension of disbelief. And it seems to me that, you know, because he talks about this idea of ambivalence so much in his, in relation to his own experiences with opium, that this really is where it's coming from to him. He's really getting this idea about the nature of drama and the nature of literature even and the nature of the experience of reading or being in an audience in front of a performance, as again, you know, very much getting the audience to really share not just the visions, or the actual content of an experience on drugs, which Coleridge may have had, for example, as a writer. But the very quality of that experience. Now, I think this is the real clever move that he's trying to make.

He doesn't just want to show you, for example, the images that he had during his dream of Zanadu. He wants to get you to experience this sense of leaving your judgments aside and somehow it's suspending your disbelief. Richard, there's a feeling in Bodleau, for instance, and I think this question is that it's rather cheating, taking drugs. Well, Baudelaire develops a great revulsion for drugs because of the morphine and the other stuff that he's having to take to deal with his venereal disease. And that's that repulsion once through everything he says.

And Flobeau is very cross with him for the negative way he writes about cannabis and thinks he's giving a gift to the priests and the moralists and says so. And I've just been reading Julian Barnes's wonderful translation of Alphonse Dode's memoir, of having the final stages of syphilis and treating it with morphine. And one sees again the very tight connection between revulsion at one's physical decay and the medicines that one needs to cope with the pain. Sadie Plain, you've argued that drugs have played a role in detective fiction We can switch towards the end of the century now. I mean, I suppose the most obvious is Sherlock Holmes shooting up.

Yes, indeed. It's curious, it would be... Well, if you did that now, you would probably... You would have to be a sort of a dark American writer being very dangerous. But this is a mainstream jolly chap who all schoolboys wanted to imitate. Yes, well, certainly he's become that figure now.

Well, not a jolly, but I'm an accepted, yeah. Yeah, but... Very heavily accepted from the start, isn't it? Oh, true, but I think, you know, it's... Again, we've probably forgotten. you know, how novel this sort of figure of the outsider detective was maybe when detective fiction was a new genre. And, you know, obviously a character like Sherlock Holmes,

as you say, comes relatively late in the 19th century. And certainly, you know, cocaine, as he often says, is his drug. And he really sets up a relationship, or rather Conan Doyle, sets up a relationship for Sherlock Holmes between the work of detective inquiry, this kind of mixture really between a very intuitive approach and a very rational approach and one that of course pays great attention to detail and so on. And at the same time he sets up really an equivalent between that and the use of cocaine

and often says if he doesn't have one then he'll use the other. And that's a theme which you can trace all the way through the 19th century sort of emergence of detective fiction. Edgar Allan Poe is again, you know, perhaps the person with which it first begins in terms of his short stories. And Wilkie Collins with the Moonstone, which is widely said to be the first full-length detective fiction. And in Poe's work often, and certainly in Collins' novel, The Moonstone, opium in this case, not only plays a role in the story, it's really the solution to the mystery that he sets up in that book.

But it seems to me, again, rather as we were saying in terms of Coelwich, that Collins, in this case, is really trying to not just convey something about how the drug works or suddenly how it works within his story. But again, he's trying to convey something about the experience, for example, of time or the more sort of structural experience of taking a drug such as opium. So his detective fiction, for example, has all detective fiction now, tends to begin at the end of the story and loop back again to the beginning. This is a device with which obviously we're very familiar now, but at the time it was quite novel.

He had a tendency to be able to sort of try and set everything out on a plane rather than have a linear kind of story. And again, it seems that that's trying to convey something of the quality of the experience. Do you think, Mike Jair, there's a sense in which the drug, well all of you, the sense in which the drug in the idea of these particular drugs we're talking about in the 19th century, is an attempt to explore the irrational side of ourselves and a continuing attack on or worry about the rational

or might even say the merely rational. What do you think of that? It's not too hard for us to understand that part of the late 19th century or the Fand de Siercla, which celebrated irrationality through drugs or occultism or whatever. But I do think, actually, that the majority of people who take drugs in the 19th century are actually still holding, in a sense,

to this enlightenment program, the idea that we're taking this in order to understand how the human mind works. The 19th century is the great era of trying to understand what the mind is and what it does. And I also think behind a lot of the flamboyant literary figures of the 19th century, there lurks as scientist. I think the person who really starts taking hashish in Paris in the 1840s, is the psychiatrist or alienist Jacques Joseph Morrow de Tour.

And he's the man who goes to Egypt, he's the man who studies how hashish is taken, he's the man who brings it back to Paris, he's the man who takes it, and then he's the man who sets up the Club de Hashishine, this sort of faux-oriental secret society, where these writers and artists come and take the drug. And I'm sure the reason that he does that

is because he's very interested to see what the effects of hashish will be on the minds of people of genius and artists and intellectuals and so on. But he doesn't want to be the man with the white coat and the clipboard because that would give the wrong frame for the experience. So he sets up the notion that this is some kind of oriental, luxurious secret society, which they then write about. We now read de Nerval and Baudelaire and assume that this is coming from them.

But actually, although there is an irrational strand in 19th century drug-taking, I think there's a strong scientific and rational strand throughout as well. And you could say he continues with Freud with his first published work on Uber. Absolutely. Yeah, Freud would really be the epitome of that. He'd be at the end of that trajectory. He was very reluctantly weaned off cocaine, wasn't he? I mean, he thought it was a great...

And you suggest that psychology became his drug. Or psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis, yeah. Well, I think in many ways it's really true, you know, not only for him personally, rather like Sherlock Holmes, you know, who, when he didn't have cocaine, he turned to analysis. A detective work, which, of course, is very close to Freud's idea of psychoanalysis. Can I ask Richard Dunport Hines, you've mentioned two or three times during this program

about the terror, that's maybe too strong of it, the fear, that exclusive classes had that the masses would get hold of these drugs, and then these drugs which are okay for them would be terrible for the rest. Yeah. Do you think that that feeling begins to express this, in law in the 20th century with these prohibition movements. And also the idea, if you don't mind you burdening you a little more, that there was worry that there was going to be too much pleasure down there,

and they down there were going to enjoy life too much, and that is going to worryingly take them away from work. Pleasure is an absolutely key word in this, and, I mean, cocaine when it comes in in the 1880s, popularised so recklessly by Freud, is used by professional men to have. work harder in their studies at night. It's a solitary and not a social drug to make people more productive,

and that's regarded as absolutely respectable. Then turn of the century, it starts filtering into the sex industry. Cocaine comes to London, 1906, 1907, brought over by dancers in an American cabaret performing in London. So it's when a drug like cocaine gets associated with people going on a spree, that the first will hostility to it from the official classes starts around the time of the First World War.

So prohibition starts really in it to prohibit pleasure? Well, prohibition is an absolute United States invention inspired by the same people who being in alcohol prohibition, being in very strict prohibition laws on drugs in the United States. And prohibition has brought us the most immense amount of problems with alcohol and some people think of drugs.

But that's another prohibition. and that's another day, and thank you all very much indeed for being such good sports and galloping through subjects, which I know you tread on extremely carefully in your private studies, so back to them, and back now to Radio 4. Thanks to Sadie Plant, Richard Dunport-Hines and Mike Jay, and thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast.

You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk, forward slash radio 4.