Drugs and Narcotics in History (review)

The editors and authors of these eleven somewhat disjointed essays intended to explore the historical intermingling—confusion—of concepts such as “drug,” “medicine,” “narcotic,” and “addiction.” However, with one exception, they have not much alleviated the problem. Moreover, “narcotics” has been abandoned in favor of “opioids” for morphine derivatives and is no longer applied to other somnifacient agents. This is no mere quibble; historians should remember that when they use words correctly they have not necessarily committed criminal presentism.

John Scarborough surveys opium preparations in ancient texts, although he ascribes greater efficacy to them than is warranted: neither the persistence of a remedy in folk tradition, the number of times it is mentioned in a given text, nor its inclusion in a twentieth-century pharmacognosy text is evidence of its efficacy. Besides, relaxation of intestinal smooth muscle does not relieve diarrhea. Rudi Matthee outlines the tensions among political, commercial, and religious responses to addicting “stimulants” such as tobacco, coffee, and alcoholic beverages in the early modern period. Other authors provide much new information about research on and development of opioid-based analgesics, and their legislated controls, in Germany, Britain, and the United States, although their presentations are sometimes marred by moral judgments. One of these writers also offends by his unprofessional autobiographical statement that “Most of his time is wasted trying to teach undergraduates” at his university (p. x). Neither Ann Dally’s unsubstantiated polemic, in which she mistakes “Personal Communications” for evidence, nor a paper on alcoholism among Navajos has any place in this collection.

The highlights of the book are the papers by three scholars who are familiar with the pharmacological concepts they employ. John Parascandola traces how the words “drug” and “abuse” came to be associated with “narcotics” by the 1910s, via misapplication of the concept of habit-forming drugs. Caroline Jean Acker shows how physicians’ attitudes toward opium derivatives evolved from neutrality to regarding addicts as “liars who had lost all moral sense” (p. 126) by the 1940s. The most innovative essay is Andreas-Holger Maehle’s account of eighteenth-century experiments designed to elucidate opium’s various mechanisms of action. Regrettably, he does not give full credit to John Jones for his synthesis of clinical thinking about opium at the beginning of the century (The Mysteries of Opium Reveal’d, 1701). Nevertheless, Maehle’s conclusion that “if experimental findings disagreed with therapeutic practice they were ignored or rejected; if they agreed, they were dismissed as being nothing new” (p. 65) is consistent with those derived from recent historical studies of other drug classes, and helps explain the historical oblivion of similar early pharmacological studies.

In summary, students of the history of opiates and other drugs, and perhaps of addiction, will find some new and useful information here, but they will have to be selective in what they take away from these essays.