Opium: A History, and: Cocaine: Global Histories, and: Cocaine: From Medical Marvel to Modern Menace in the United States, 1884-1920 (review)

Martin Booth. Opium: A History. Reprint. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1999. xii + 381 pp. $14.95 (paperbound).

Paul Gootenberg, ed. Cocaine: Global Histories. London: Routledge, 1999. xvi + 213 pp. Ill. $U.S. 90.00 (cloth), $U.S. 25.99 (paperbound); $Can. 135.00 (cloth), $Can. 38.99 (paperbound).

Joseph F. Spillane. Cocaine: From Medical Marvel to Modern Menace in the United States, 1884-1920. Studies in Industry and Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. x + 214 pp. Ill. $39.95.

These three volumes chronicle the beneficial pain-killing property, and especially the addictive potential (so intertwined with political and economic malfeasance), of narcotics from prehistory until our own day.

Martin Booth, a novelist and filmmaker, has researched opium's documentary history and interviewed officials and scientists around the world to prepare his brisk narrative. He explores the botany of the opium poppy, and the spread of opium in the ancient world and later Arab culture, whose major physician, Avicenna, used it medically and recreationally. So, later, did Paracelsus. Sydenham eulogized opium. Chaucer listed famous physicians noted for their opium use. In a chapter entitled "Pleasure-domes in Xanadu," Booth discusses the role of opium in the lives of romantic authors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The traffic in opium--especially in the Orient, where a more deliberate effort was being made to sell it to the common people--and the impact of this on wars and changing geography, receive detailed attention in Booth's work. With the twentieth century came both mobsters to push sales and international conferences to set up generally futile efforts to control opium traffic. Booth brings this complex scenario right up to date. His book is mainly a tragic tale, clearly told and forthrightly interpreted--a quick way to gain the important background on what the author terms "perhaps the most significant cultural phenomena [sic] of the late twentieth century" (p. 343).

Joseph F. Spillane presents a carefully researched and somewhat revisionary history of a different narcotic, cocaine, over a shorter time span and in but a single country, the United States. The traditional history draws the crucial line between two periods of cocaine control with the Harrison Act of 1914--but this, he argues, exaggerates the crucial difference between an earlier period when dispensing cocaine was legal, relying on physicians' judgment when to refrain from doing so, and a later period when a large "shadow market" had developed to distribute cocaine in underground ways to a disparaged underclass. Spillane describes "The Medical Era," 1885-95, during which cocaine came on the market as an anesthetic, sinus remedy, hay fever and asthma remedy, and treatment for opiate addiction. He describes how it was marketed by less elevated producers as coca wines, proprietary tonics, soft drinks, and patent medicines for asthma and catarrh, and how habituation developed, at first from ill-advised prescribing, with the victims mainly in the brainworking class (including physicians themselves). In the '90s the cocaine scene changed: "The Popular Era," 1895-1920, began. Cocaine consumption expanded, and its chief users shifted to "laborers, youths, blacks, and the urban underworld" (p. 91). The image of users began to resemble that of carriers of contagious diseases, "cocaine fiends." The middle class, becoming persuaded that many progressive reforms were required for the good of the nation, thought restraints on "cocaine fiends" necessary. Spillane spells out the variety of ways in which cocaine controls fit the broader ambitions of progressivism, and he provides shrewd counsel on what lessons his account of earlier history may teach those involved in the current drug war.

Spillane also contributes the chapter on cocaine in the United States, 1880-1920, to the "first substantial book on global cocaine history" (p. xii), edited by Paul Gootenberg and...