High Society: The Central Role of Mind-Altering Drugs in History, Science, and Culture by Mike Jay

Author:Mike Jay [Jay, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2010-10-19T00:00:00+00:00

By 1900 the Bayer pharmaceutical range included both Heroin, a powerful new variant on morphine, and Aspirin, an opiate-free analgesic. Veronal, launched by Bayer in 1903, represented a new category of sedatives, the barbiturates, which would be marketed as a less addictive alternative to opiates. (Wellcome Library, London)

A substitute was also found for cocaine’s stimulant effects. Since the 1880s, chemists had been investigating the alkaloids of the ephedra plant, widely used across Asia as a herbal stimulant, and in 1927 the British pharmacologist Gordon Alles synthesized a derivative that he named amphetamine. He experimented on himself and noted a marked stimulant effect, after which the new drug began to circulate around the medical profession. William Sargant, a psychiatrist at London’s Maudsley Hospital, took a powerful dose before wandering around the zoo ‘with a most delightful sense of confidence and not in the least fatigued’; he took more before sitting his diploma examination, and passed with flying colours. He tested it on depressives, and found that their moods temporarily lifted; he even established that it improved their scores in intelligence tests. Less markedly euphoric than cocaine and longer-acting, amphetamine had great therapeutic potential, but also functional benefits for the sane and healthy.

Amphetamines found their first major application during the Second World War, when they were used to boost the endurance of soldiers and pilots in combat. Thereafter, they became a popular over-the-counter pharmaceutical, marketed for mood elevation, energy and ‘pep’, but it was not long before their open sale began to acquire the taint that had attached to opiates and cocaine. William Sargant was appalled that such a valuable energy and intelligence booster had become ‘a source of cheap “kicks”’ for ‘psychopaths, drug addicts and simple delinquents’. In Britain, as elsewhere, their sale was more strictly regulated; yet, as with valium and the other sedatives that were emerging at the same time to replace the cruder barbiturates, they remained hybrid substances, valued therapeutic agents and stigmatized ‘drugs’ simultaneously. Once laws were in place to define legitimate therapeutic applications, a clear distinction could in theory be made between ‘medical’ and ‘recreational’ use, or ‘use’ and ‘abuse’. In practice, however, modern societies would continue to require a wide spectrum of culturally sanctioned stimulants and sedatives, and their citizens would continue to demand them for reasons that blurred the boundaries between therapy and pleasure, ‘feeling good’ and ‘feeling better’.

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