Private Eyes
I begin to write, almost without realizing it, without thinking, busy transmitting these words I don't recognize, although they are highly significant: "Too much! Too much! You're giving me too much!"
Henri Michaux, Darkness Moves
A vast literature on drugs has assembled itself in the last two hundred years. It begins with the late eighteenth century's explorations of opium, wends its way through cannabis, coca, and cocaine, and later finds itself entangled with a wide variety of plant hallucinogens and synthetic drugs.
Like their writings and their writers, these substances could hardly be more diverse. Some of them are ancient, others very new. Some are synthesized in laboratories, and some grow wild. Some are widely used as medicines, a few are fatal in large doses, some have no toxicity at all. In the twentieth century, the vast majority of these substances find themselves controlled by some of the world's oldest international agreements and its most extensive national laws. But they do have their own common ground as well. Whether they are organic or synthetic, old or new, stimulating, narcotic, or hallucinogenic, all these drugs have some specific psychoactive effect: they all shift perceptions, affect moods, change behavior, and alter states of mind. And all of them have exerted an influence hat extends far beyond their users. The laws and wars on drugs are symptomatic of the ways in which these substances provoke the same extreme reactions in cultures, economies--social, political, legal--and even military systems. Their effects on the human nervous system seem to repeat themselves wherever they occur. When drugs change their users, they change everything.
Drugs snatch us out of everyday reality, blur our perception, alter our sensations, and, in a word, put the entire universe in a state of suspension. Octavio Paz, Alternating Current
Every drug has its own character, its unique claims to fame. The coca bush gets its name from the Aymara word khoka, meaning simply "tree"; the word hashish is derived from the Arabic word for herb, or grass, as if it were the herb par excellence; and the Mexican psilocybin mushroom is known as teonanactl, which translates as "flesh of the gods." But there is something about opium, with all its varied properties and histories, that allows this drug to set the scene. "Of all drugs," wrote Jean Cocteau, "opium is the drug."
Opium is extracted from the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum, which is cultivated and harvested today with the same techniques that have been recorded over thousands of years. Once the poppies have flowered, the seed heads are scored with a knife and left to bleed a sticky substance from their wounds. The seed heads are scored in the afternoons, with a three- or four-bladed knife, and the next day the latex is collected with a flat blade. The process is repeated several times until the seedpod's supply of opium has been exhausted.
The poppy head yields a number of potent psychoactive alkaloids that have allowed opium to play a very special role in the story of the human use of drugs. It is widely acknowledged to be one of the world's oldest, most powerful, and most effective medicines, and while the earliest uses of opium may have been purely medicinal, plenty of circumstantial evidence suggests that its use as an intoxicant is as old as the hills in which it grows. Evidence of its use has been found in several regions of the world: it can be traced to Neolithic settlements on the shorelines of Swiss lakes, the eastern Mediterranean, and the Black Sea coast. It was cultivated in Mesopotamia by the Sumerians, and later known in Egypt, where traces of it have been found in tombs dating back to the fifteenth century B.C. Opium was used in ancient Greece, where Plotinus was said to be a regular user of a drug to which Homer is thought to refer in the Odyssey when he describes "a medicine to banish grief." Opium was also known in Rome, where it acquired an association with Morpheus, the god of dreams, who later gave his name to morphine. Its Chinese use is lost in the mists of time.
Arab merchants were probably the first large-scale distributors of the drug, selling it for centuries across Asia and the Middle East, and by the sixteenth century, opium was widely traded and used in Turkey, Persia, and India. Western interest in the drug was growing fast as well. Paracelsus popularized its medical use in the sixteenth century and developed what would later become a popular preparation: laudanum. In the seventeenth century, Thomas Sydenham declared that medicine would be useless without opium. His statement remains true to this day. By the eighteenth century, opium had been used, abused, and discussed by a great number of European scholars, doctors, and travelers, whose tales about its use in the East shrouded it in a seductive air of mystique. The vast bulk of the West's opium was imported from Turkey and other areas of the Middle East, where the quality was famously high. But opium poppies also grew wild in several areas of the British Isles, where the Society of Arts promoted the domestic cultivation of opium poppies, awarding medals for high yields and qualities. Even garden lettuce, closely related to the opium poppy, yielded lactarium, a mild opiate that eighteenth-century market gardeners processed and sold as a by-product.
Raw opium was the first drug to give up the secrets of its chemistry when, in 1804, morphine was extracted from it. Morphine was followed by codeine, and more than fifty alkaloids have been identified in opium itself. Morphine is its most powerful alkaloid, and, isolated from its organic base, it proved a malleable and efficient pharmaceutical. Although it was mainly taken orally in the early decades of its use, morphine's remarkable properties encouraged experiments with other means of ingestion. It was, for example, applied to patches of raw skin exposed by blistering or inserted under the skin on the tip of a lancet.
And then came the syringe, an instrument that shared its history with the drugs with which it has become so closely tied. Opium is thought to have been the first substance to be smoked in a pipe, and it also inspired the earliest attempt to get drugs straight into the bloodstream when Christopher Wren combined a quill and a bladder to produce the first syringe in 1656. This early experiment did at least prove that such injections were possible: he injected a dog with opium and the dog died. When the modern hypodermic syringe was developed in the 1850s, it was morphine that popularized its use.
Like morphine itself, the syringe was cleaner, safer, and more clinical than any earlier means of inserting drugs into the body. "The advantages of the hypodermic injection of morphia over its administration by the mouth are immense," wrote Francis Anstie, one of its leading protagonists. "Of danger, there is absolutely none." Both morphine and the syringe were promoted as sophisticated medical aids, and there was such enthusiasm for this double act that injections of morphine were even used to treat addiction to opium. Hypodermic morphine became so popular that, by 1870, there had developed increasing fears that morphine might itself become a problem. And then came the cure to end all cures. Diacetylmorphine, a synthesis of morphine and acetic anhydride, was first produced in 1874 by an English chemist, C. R. Wright. He thought its effects were too powerful and unpleasant to be pursued. But later chemists were intrigued, and by the end of the century, diacetylmorphine was being marketed as "Heroin." It was made by the German pharmaceutical company Bayer, which promoted it as a nonaddictive substitute for morphine, and its medical use was approved in several countries, including Britain and America. Contrary to Bayer's original claims, heroin is one of the most addictive substances in the world.
The needle is not important. Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction.
William Burroughs, Naked Lunch
In both Britain and America, a wide range of opiated preparations were on sale for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There were no restrictions on their use until the late 1860s, and even then they continued to be popular. One of the first common mixtures was tincture of opium, or laudanum, a drink made from opium mixed with alcohol and distilled water. Camphorated tincture of opium, or paregoric, was also widely used, and in Britain and America there were dozens of patent medicines--Chlorodyne, Godfrey's Cordial, Dover's Powder, and such tempting remedies as Battley's Sedative Solution and Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup--many of which contained substantial quantities of morphine.
These were the first over-the-counter, self-administered drugs. Companies were not obliged to list ingredients until the early years of the twentieth century, and all the available statistics on imports and sales of opium suggest that the drugs were used by nearly everyone--as cures for illnesses such as dysentery and cholera, and also as painkillers and sedatives. In London, wrote Thomas De Quincey in Confessions of the English Opium-Eater, published in 1821, "the number of ameteur opium-eaters (as I may term them) was, at this time, immense." In Manchester, he was "informed by several cotton-manufacturers, that their work-people were rapidly getting into the practice of opium-eating; so much so, that on Saturday afternoon the counters of the druggists were strewn with one, two, or three grains, in preparation for the known demand of the evening." Opium was cheap, plentiful, and without prejudice: the perfect quick fix of its day. Mothers used it to keep babies quiet, and workers in the foundries, the factories, and the mills used it to sleep at night and survive the working day. As De Quincey observed, "Happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat pocket: portable ecstasies might be had corked up in a pint bottle: and peace of mind could be sent down in gallons by the mail coach." Although, as he quickly added, "nobody will laugh long who deals much with opium: its pleasures even are of a grave and solemn complexion."
It now seems remarkable that opium was ever such a simple fact of daily life. Even mild, medicinal doses can affect perceptions and states of mind; it is difficult to speculate about the impact of such widespread use on the social atmosphere, the culture's sensibility, the population's mood. Opium grew in popularity in the late eighteenth century, as the first steam engines sputtered into life and the first great factories were built. The populations of cities grew, and the old routines of rural life, with its sense of identity and continuity, were disrupted, sometimes wiped away. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was possible to look back and see that the whole landscape of the culture had been transformed. Railway lines were laid, canals were cut, bridges were suspended over wide rivers. Trade routes and colonies had multiplied, all the maps were different, all the goods were new. Minds had been changed by a wave of revolutions--in America and France, as well as in philosophy, science, and the arts. It seemed as if nothing was standing still.
"Already, in this year, 1845," wrote De Quincey in "Suspiria de Profundis," the second of his essays on opium,
what by the procession through fifty years of mighty revolutions amongst the kingdoms of the earth, what by the continual development of vast physical agencies--steam in all its applications, light getting under harness as a slave for man, powers from heaven descending upon education and accelerations of the press, powers from hell (as it might seem, but these also celestial coming round upon artillery and the forces of destruction)--the eye of the calmest observer is troubled; the brain is haunted as if by some jealousy of ghostly beings moving amongst us.
Already, in 1845? As if it was all happening too early, too soon, too fast; as if something was already too late. Surrounded by new mediations and mechanisms challenging man's "imperial nature" and interrupting his engagement with the world, De Quincey felt himself losing track: "Even thunder and lightning, it pains me to say, are not the thunder and lightning which I seem to remember about the time of Waterloo." De Quincey wanted to find his feet amid the great new orchestrations of an industrial revolution that he felt had "disconnected man's heart from the ministers of his locomotion." He needed to be able to dream again in a world whose dreams had become "too much liable to disturbance from the gathering agitation of our present English life." And, as he discovered, "some merely physical agencies can and do assist the faculty of dreaming almost preternaturally. Amongst these," he writes, "is intense exercise; to some extent, at least, and for some persons, but beyond all others is opium."
De Quincey made his name as the opium eater par excellence when he published Confessions, but he was by no means the first writer to turn to opium for some respite from the "eternal hurry" and the "colossal pace of advance" that had characterized English life since the late eighteenth century. Nor was he the only one to have discovered opium's "specific power" to enhance his dreams and memories. Scott, Shelley, Wordsworth, Southey, Byron, Keats ... reams of gothic fiction and Romantic poetry had taken something of their character from the drug. In many cases, opium exerted a subtle influence that is difficult to isolate from all the other themes explored by these writers. But sometimes the effects of the drug are writ large in the stories and poems composed by writers on opium. As De Quincey discovered in Confessions, the drug can be far more than an engaging theme, a literary device, an object of research: this is a substance that has powers and an agency of its own. "Opium, not the Opium-Eater, is the hero" of all these tales.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.
These are the opening lines of "Kubla Khan," a poem written in the late 1790s that has since become one of the modern world's most loved pieces of poetry. The poem had some vicious critics in its day, but Xanadu, the pleasure dome, and the sunless sea became well-known features of the modern imaginative landscape.
Copyright © 2000 by Sadie Plant