Pubdate: Fri, 22 Sep 2000
Source: Times Literary Supplement, The (UK)
Copyright: TLS 2000
Address: Admiral House 66-68 East Smithfield London E1W 1BX
Fax: 020-7782 3100
Website:  27
Author: Richard Davenport-Hines

SNOW BUSINESS

Joseph F. Spillane COCAINE: From medical marvel to modem menace in the 
United States 1884-1920 214pp. Johns Hopkins University Press; distributed 
in the UK by Plymbridge. $3l. TLS $29. 0801862302

Paul Gootenberg, editor COCAINE: Global histories 290pp. Routledge.
$45 (paperback, $14.99). TLS $42; $12.99. 0415192471

History is the most dangerous concoction the chemistry of the mind has 
produceed, Paul Valery wrote. "It sets people dreaming, intoxicates them, 
engenders false memories, exaggerates their reflexes, keeps old wounds 
open, torments their leisure, inspires them with megalomania or persecution 
complex." The history of cocaine promises double rations of these 
disturbing phenomena.

Joseph F. Spillane has written an immaculate monograph on the drug's early 
history in the United States of America; though some parts of his story 
have been covered by previous historians, his use of archives and diverse 
other sources means that he writes with unparalleled authority.

The scientific, medical and commercial elements of cocaine's early history 
are recapitulated masterfully; and his study of the supply of cocaine, and 
the behaviour of its users in their social milieux, constitutes major 
revisionism with lessons for contemporary policy.

Paul Gootenberg has edited a collection of historical essays on the 
international supply networks of cocaine since the 1880s. Almost all are of 
a high standard of research, insight and analysis, and they make valuable 
supplementary reading to Spillane; Marcel de Kort's summary of his 
dissertation on Dutch cocaine history makes one wish that the full study 
was available in English. Although de Kort's is perhaps the most important 
essay in Gootenberg's collection, Mary Roldan's study of Colombia and 
Steven Karch on Japan are also conspicuously informative and suggestive.

After the discovery in 1884 that cocaine was a superb anaesthetic in eye, 
nose and mouth surgery, the drug was widely adopted by American physicians 
in anaesthesia, as a tome for mind and body, and in the treatment of opiate 
addiction, alcoholism and sinus conditions. But as early as 1890 these same 
physicians were discarding its therapeutic use. They recognized that the 
habit could develop rapidly after the intiation of use, that addicts 
increased their doses more rapidly with cocaine than with opiates and that 
abstinence was often difficult.

Both American and European medical experts identified cocaine with loss of 
self-control. "Nineteenth century opiate addicts often lived with their 
addictions for years without seriously impairing their family relations or 
their ability to work", as Spillane demonstrates. By contrast, "nearly 
every published case of cocaine addiction ... mentioned startling physical 
deterioration and associated behavioural changes".

The sophistication of physicians' use of cocaine - "their attentiveness to 
the effects of form, dosage, route of administration and even setting" - 
was far superior to their introduction of chloral or the hypodermic 
administration of morphine which had taken place a few decades earlier.

As the medical prescription of cocaine diminished, so cocaine snuffs 
professing to cure asthma and catarrh were strenuously marketed The cocaine 
content of most such products was about 5 per cent, although Ryno's Hay 
Fever and Catarrh Remedy was 99 per cent cocaine.

Cocaine snuffs and sprays created social problems among adolescents and 
young men. "I have a son that has been using it and have tried for the last 
year to break him from it", one parent railed against Ryno's. "It is 
ruining our boys."

Spillane uses pharmaceutical archives and the trade press to demonstrate 
that the increased capacity of the American pharmaceutical industry to 
produce, market and distribute new products popularized cocaine.

By 1903, despite declining medical interest in its therapeutic use and 
physicians' disapproval of its unregulated distribution, American cocaine 
consumption had grown to five times the level of 1890. This problem 
contributed to the foundation of the Federal Drug Administration in 1906. 
Soaring consumption was not solely the result of aggressive marketing by 
pharmaceutical businesses. Around 1890, roustabouts toiling on the 
waterfronts of New Orleans and the Mississippi River "adopted cocaine as a 
drug compatible with the demands of hard labor and fast living". when these 
stevedores went to work elsewhere in the American South, they took their 
habits with them The managers of Southern construction camps and 
Mississippi River plantations used cocaine as a means of increasing 
production and managing their workforce.

The drug was popular in Colorado mining camps by 1894. It was supplied at 
company stores; according to a labour organizer: "the workers, once 
addicted, cannot think of going away from their source of supply."

In textile mills, cocaine was popularized by supervisors and employers as 
well as by workers themselves. This popularity among the black labouring 
poor led, by the end of the century, to racist panics about black "cocaine 
fiends" going on sexual and other rampages against white people, and after 
1900 legislation against the drug's use was introduced in many localities.

In America, cocaine use and attitudes to its users seem to have been 
distinctive. Few Europeans of this period set out to acquire the cocaine 
habit for pleasure or to defy the authorities. The case of Sarah 
Bernhardt's husband Jacques Damala was an early exception in France; but as 
late as 1897, the addiction expert Sir Clifford Allbutt (George Eliot's 
model for Dr Lydgate) had "never seen a case of cocainism m which the drug 
was sought from the beginning for its own sake". Yet in the US, cocaine 
after about 1893 joined the other vices - opium, tobacco and alcohol - 
favoured by prostitutes, pimps, gamblers and hoodlums in American towns and 
cities. The association of cocaine use with social settings and pleasure 
appeared to confirm that users were deliber ately seeking a deviant 
identity. Spillane prints a fascinating account dating from 1896 of "a 
cocaine joint disguised as a drugstore" operating in St Louis, Missouri. It 
had its sordid counterparts in all the big cities.

A police investigation of 1909 identified sixty-three similar drugstores m 
the Tenderloin district of New York. Spillane anatomizes this distribution 
system with unprecedented precision.

Years before state or federal laws were introduced to regulate access to 
cocaine, many druggists were declining to sell it in large amounts, or to 
certain types of customer This voluntary self-restraint accentuated the 
specialized and geographically specific network between cocaine suppliers 
and their clients.

Except in vice districts, or marginal urban areas, "cocaine retailers faced 
critical scrutiny from within their communities The private language of the 
1890s cocaine sub-culture - calling the drug coke, snow, or brighteye, for 
example - "highlights the functional purpose of concealing the nature of 
the transaction from either social or legal sanction".

Spillane demonstrates that the prohibition of non-medical use of cocaine 
under state laws, and the federal Harrison Act of 1914, merely reinforced 
existing trends to underground sales, low purity, adulteration and high 
prices. High cocaine prices and economic crime began before Prohibition. 
'Moth critics and supporters of prohibitionist policies", he concludes, 
equate much too facilely the acceptability and accessibility of a drug with 
its legal status.

This easy equation was not true in the past, nor is it true today."

The illicit use of cocaine in the US almost vanished in the late 1940s. 
However, the refusal by American leaders to treat illicit drugs "simply as 
commodities" that "shape and are shaped by demand and supply, exchange and 
consumption" has proved disastrous in the past thirty years.

The co-operative programmes against marijuana cultivation and smuggling 
launched by the US and Mexican governments in 1969 diverted traffickers 
from the marijuana business to cocaine with memorable results in the 1970s 
and 1980s. Spillane's Cocaine shows that the better chance of reducing 
illicit drug consump-tion lies in commodification of the substances rather 
than in symbolic crusades and warrior rhetoric.

Reading Joseph Spillane and Paul Gootenberg's essayists together, it seems 
that the United States' historical experience of cocaine has always been 
extreme and atypical.

It is always inappropriate for Europeans to fol-low American models of 
drugs regulation and policing too closely.

The cultural reasons that made the Americans such a special case should be 
a matter of imperative study.
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