Demons: Our Changing Attitudes to Alcohol, Tobacco, and Drugs

  • Virginia Berridge
Oxford University Press: 2013. 9780199604982 | ISBN: 978-0-1996-0498-2

Drugged: The Science and Culture Behind Psychotropic Drugs

  • Richard J. Miller
Oxford University Press: 2013. 9780199957972 | ISBN: 978-0-1999-5797-2

From drinking espresso to shooting heroin, the human impulse towards altered mental states is universal. Now two books explore the history of individual and social attitudes to psychotropic drugs, and the science of pharmacology.

In Demons, science historian Virginia Berridge focuses on drug cultures, primarily in Britain and to a lesser extent in the United States, Europe and Asia. She chronicles the consumption of opium, alcohol, tobacco, cocaine and cannabis, from the nineteenth century onwards, and examines attempts at official control. Berridge points out that a drug's acceptability to mainstream society fluctuates more owing to social and cultural trends than to medical knowledge. The periodic reclassification of drugs is “not a 'rational' process”, she concludes.

A poster from the 1920s reflects the era's fashion for drug-taking. Credit: WEIMAR ARCHIVE/MARY EVANS PICTURE LIBRARY

Drugged, by pharmacologist Richard Miller, offers the biochemical research absent from Demons. We visit university and industrial laboratories, learn about medical trials and clinical applications, and explore the structures of organic molecules and their functions. Despite copious diagrams, much of the technical detail will be impenetrable to the generalist, unlike the accessible Demons. However, Miller casts his net wider than does Berridge, covering everything from tea and coffee to LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) and Prozac (fluoxetine hydrochloride), and not limiting himself geographically. He also makes lengthy and lively excursions into culture.

Opium gets the most attention in both books. The latex from the opium poppy Papaver somniferum (from which opium and opiates such as morphine come) has been cultivated and used medically and recreationally for millennia, and began to seep into the West in the sixteenth century. As both Berridge and Miller discuss, the opium wars of the mid-nineteenth century, which pitted China against the French and British, played a key part in international regulation of drugs in the twentieth century. Opium was ubiquitous in Victorian Britain, almost like aspirin today, notes Berridge. Prized as a painkiller and stimulant, it was prescribed for everything from heart disease to gallstones, and taken as pills, lozenges, powder and even enemas. In the marshy Fens of eastern England, opium-spiked beer soothed fevers, chills and rheumatism. Prime Minister William Gladstone is said to have taken opium in coffee before big speeches.

By mid-century, the tincture laudanum was the most widely used form of opium. Medicinal use often led to addiction, as with early adopters such as Thomas De Quincey, author of the autobiographical Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821). Wilkie Collins, whose detective novel The Moonstone (1868) featured opium addiction, became so dependent on laudanum that he eventually took it in quantities large enough to kill an unhabituated person, and suffered paranoid delusions. Even Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, created in the 1880s, injected himself with morphine and cocaine for “mental exaltation”, although in the final stories Holmes has been weaned off the habit, presumably in deference to growing social disapproval.

Laudanum (opium tincture) was a Victorian panacea. Credit: SCIENCE MUSEUM, LONDON/WELLCOME IMAGES

Opium, alcohol and cocaine were also active ingredients in many US patent medicines in the nineteenth century. By 1900, the modern concept of addiction was beginning to emerge and the tide began to turn against cocaine and opium. In 1913, the last officially traded chest of opium was shipped from British India to China. In 1914, the US government passed the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act to limit the use of all opiates and coca products to medicine. In the 1920s, the influential International Opium Convention heralded the start of global drug control.

Cannabis (hemp) features more prominently in Drugged than in Demons. Although the drug was available in the United States long before, in the 1930s Mexican migrant labourers introduced North America to the practice of marijuana smoking. Marijuana was adopted first by black jazz musicians, and then, from the 1950s, by white society. Its demonization by the US government began with the federal Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, which made it prohibitively expensive for any purpose, including medicinal use. As Miller powerfully describes, the legislation was the result of racist scare tactics against Mexicans and black people by Harry Anslinger, the commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962. He was supported by leaders of the synthetics industry, who wanted to end nascent US hemp production.

As for alcohol, the United States' nationwide prohibition from 1920 was repealed in 1933, during the Great Depression. The federal government needed the tax revenue. Moreover, attitudes had changed: prohibition had not solved industrial issues such as absenteeism, yet it had encouraged organized crime, political corruption and a trade in poisonous illicit alcohol. However, as Berridge stresses, prohibition also significantly reduced US drinking and alcohol-related disease, and might have worked had it been less restrictive. It would have failed in Britain, she argues, because of the complex British attitude to drunkenness. Norman Kerr, a physician and founder of the Society for the Study and Cure of Inebriety in 1884, asked whether inebriation was “a sin, a crime, a vice or a disease”. This is a question that many are still attempting to answer in binge-drinking Britain.

However the use and abuse of specific drugs may shift over time and space, the need to bend the mind seems tightly tied to human culture. Berridge and Miller ably unpick the threads of that universal urge.