Intoxication by Ronald K. Siegel Ph.D

Author:Ronald K. Siegel, Ph.D.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Inner Traditions / Bear & Company
Published: 2011-10-21T16:00:00+00:00

9

A Bevy of Beasts

DRUGS IN THE SOCIAL GROUP

The beast was marked for an early death. The face had a ghostly pallor; its skin was tight and green, almost moldy.

The beauty, the “divine” Sarah Bernhardt, pushed into the room with eager curiosity. “C’est magnifique!” shouted Madame Sarah.

“C’est horrible!” gasped the ladies who accompanied her to this San Francisco opium den in May 1887.

As Bernhardt leaned over the opium smoker and watched his dreamy face, reporters working for William Randolph Hearst, who had engineered this event, prepared to exploit the scene with front-page headlines in the Examiner.

Such tactics of creating a startling news story may have been good for circulation, but they were unnecessary dramatizations since Bernhardt’s real life, unknown to the reporters, had many similarities to that of the smokers in that Chinatown den. Madame Sarah’s likeness adorned advertisements for absinthe as well as a coca wine, to which she credited her health and vitality. “When at times unable to proceed, a few drops give me new life,” proclaimed the actress who was a regular user of the cocaine beverage. She was also familiar with the dreams of the opium smoker. Early in her acting career she took opium and once gave a performance under the influence. Describing this incident in her memoirs, she hinted at a nodding acquaintance with other drugs: “I was in that delicious stupor that one experiences after chloroform, morphine, opium, or hasheesh.”

Hearst and other newsmen of the day would not have profited as much from the real story. For them it was worthwhile to enlarge, not shrink, the contrast between beauty and the drug beast. Their mission was to startle and amaze and stupefy readers, thereby increasing sales. In their circulation-hungry eyes they saw drug users not as beautiful, successful women but as animals. Few pictures could show this as well as those that depicted the forbidden fruit of drugs as a beast. In 1922, when Hearst launched an antidrug crusade in his International magazine, “dope” was portrayed in an illustration as a giant drooling cheetah, hungrily devouring hordes of helpless human victims. In papers and magazines throughout the country, drugs were pictured as vipers, often encircling people as well as their towns and cities. Other dope predators, fabricated from newspaper and printer’s ink, resembled spiders, sharks, vultures, bats, mongooses, wolves, and great apes. Dope was the dragon, the living dead, the grim reaper. It could kill you faster than alcohol. Gin was portrayed as the mythological eagle that slowly tore at Prometheus’s liver, but opium was the vampire bat that quickly sucked life from the veins while its wings fanned the victims into a deadly sleep. If a narcotic monster catches you, warned an antidrug film of the time, “It makes beasts of men and women!”

The real message of these crusades was that the consequences of intoxication have little to do with the intentions and dreams that motivate use. Addiction and dependency are unbidden images that change physical, psychological, and social behaviors. The point was

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