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  • Cocaine: From Medical Marvel to Modern Menace in the United States, 1884–1920
  • John C. Burnham
Cocaine: From Medical Marvel to Modern Menace in the United States, 1884–1920. By Joseph F. Spillane (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. x plus 214 pp. $39.95).

This book is exactly what the title indicates: a history of cocaine in the United States before 1920, including the period of discovery through the implementation of federal prohibition of the non-medical use of cocaine. The general outlines of the early history are well known from such accounts written in the 1970s and 1980s as the classic work of David Musto, the general history by H. Wayne Morgan, and a book of advocacy by Lester Grinspoon and James B. Bakalar. In 1996 Jill Jonnes provided a modern history of all drugs, Hep-Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams: A History of America’s Romance with Illegal Drugs. In addition, a substantial number of publications deal with special incidents, particularly the early scientific use of cocaine by Sigmund Freud and the inclusion of cocaine in the Harrison Act of 1914.

Now Joseph Spillane has provided a new, detailed history, carefully crafted and with reader-friendly summaries. If the general story was already established, what does his revised doctoral dissertation provide? There are three main contributions. First, this is a work of very careful scholarship, based on both primary and secondary sources. It is unlikely that a more dependable history of cocaine in America before 1920 will appear soon—or ever. Second, Spillane has revealingly situated the narrative in the modern history of medicine. And, third, Spillane has added a whole dimension to the story with extensive research into business history.

Pharmaceutical suppliers of the late nineteenth century had great difficulty in obtaining coca leaves that had any potency left in them after the extensive shipping process. And since physiological testing was just becoming standard in medicine, it was necessary to have a known chemical version, cocaine, available for clinical testing. By the late 1880s, American were following Europeans in [End Page 507] testing and prescribing, and as the Cincinnati physician Roberts Bartholow put it in 1891, “No remedy in modern times—probably in any age of the world—has become so famous in so short a time as cocaine” It was used as a surgical anesthetic, it was used as a tonic and stimulant, it was used as a substitute to combat the heroin habit, and it was used to relieve hay fever. Like all new substances, disillusion followed initial therapeutic applications, but, even so, physicians continued to find cocaine very useful in a variety of cases. But they soon tended to become very restrained in prescribing cocaine: it could be poisonous, and by the 1890s, many people were finding the chemical destructively habit forming.

When demand first hit, and European sources were inadequate, American pharmaceutical firms sent directly to Bolivia and Peru to obtain a supply of leaves and extract, and the prices declined. Using industry as well as official sources, Spillane finds that imports reached a high point around the turn of the twentieth century and then started a steady decline.

Cocaine was only one of many new drug products being marketed by American pharmaceutical companies—from proprietary “patent” medicines to the most ethical suppliers. Both types of producers went around the widespread restraint of physicians to create a popular market for cocaine. Among the most notorious carriers were soft drinks, coca wines such as Vin Mariani, and catarrh cures. Just at the turn of the century, however, cocaine functioned much less as a medical cure and began to take on a new identity: “the image of cocaine as an exclusive drug for ‘brain workers’ gave way to the image of cocaine as the common man’s drug, associated with laborers, youths, blacks, and the urban underworld.” (91) Where workers started using cocaine as a stimulant, the chemical soon migrated to the city vice districts. There social deviants gave the drug a clearly deviant identity, and it tended to replace or accompany heroin as an attractive menace. Moreover, a number of public figures spoke in tones of alarm about the way in...

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