Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories (13 page)

[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 trade 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

W
HEN 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

T.S. Eliot

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

Alexander Pope

T
HE 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

A
N 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).

Their powerful euphoric effect led to their being sold to treat all discomforts related to depression, and they were given in sometimes formidable amounts to soldiers in the Second World War. They would reduce appetite sometimes for days, as well as sleep, nausea, exhaustion and discouragement – something too tempting for military hierarchies, which began using them in the Spanish Civil War and launched full methamphetamine use with highly stressed troops from 1939 to 1945. The Germans, British, Italians and Japanese, especially, distributed hundreds of millions of annual doses as a supplement to war rations, even though plenty of lethal intoxications occurred. Japan, for example, increased the production of this stimulant to the maximum during the war.

Upon surrender, the warehoused excess disappeared, producing a flooding of the streets with those drugs, which in 1950 supplied one million delirious users and several other million who were less suicidal, the perpetrators of over half of the murders and self-inflicted permanent cerebral lesions, and being admitted by the hundreds into hospitals, with a diagnosis of furious schizophrenia. In England, the greater part of amphetamines ended up in Montgomery’s army and the Royal Air Force, and in 1941 a newspaper from the capital carried the headline
METHEDRINE WINS THE BATTLE OF LONDON
.

The postwar period modified user patterns, shifting the use of these amines to older persons, housewives and students: groups subject to boredom and lack of motivation or to the stress of having to face examinations. The free-sales regime alternated with advertisements such as ‘Two pills are better than one month’s vacation’, and soon there were moderate and immoderate users all over the planet. In 1950 the United States produced about one thousand tons yearly – eighty doses per capita, children included – a rate equaled by other nations. Amphetamine and dexamphetamine inhalers were considered medicines comparable to methol lozenges and soothing ointments, and their use in sports led to doping. Toward the end of the fifties, a world-champion cyclist died during an ascent aided by Maxiton, a methamphetamine. Shortly thereafter, twenty-three participants of the European Tour fell sick upon leaving Luchon, with symptoms described by the race doctor as caused by acute amphetamine intoxication. Two rounds later, a newspaper related that ‘it was necessary to put one of the contestants in a strait-jacket because he suffered an insanity crisis’ after ingesting one hundred pills of Tenedron, another amphetamine.