Pubdate: Fri, 22 Sep 2000 Source: Times Literary Supplement, The (UK) Copyright: TLS 2000 Address: Admiral House 66-68 East Smithfield London E1W 1BX Fax: 020-7782 3100 Website: 27 Author: Richard Davenport-Hines SNOW BUSINESS Joseph F. Spillane COCAINE: From medical marvel to modem menace in the United States 1884-1920 214pp. Johns Hopkins University Press; distributed in the UK by Plymbridge. $3l. TLS $29. 0801862302 Paul Gootenberg, editor COCAINE: Global histories 290pp. Routledge. $45 (paperback, $14.99). TLS $42; $12.99. 0415192471 History is the most dangerous concoction the chemistry of the mind has produceed, Paul Valery wrote. "It sets people dreaming, intoxicates them, engenders false memories, exaggerates their reflexes, keeps old wounds open, torments their leisure, inspires them with megalomania or persecution complex." The history of cocaine promises double rations of these disturbing phenomena. Joseph F. Spillane has written an immaculate monograph on the drug's early history in the United States of America; though some parts of his story have been covered by previous historians, his use of archives and diverse other sources means that he writes with unparalleled authority. The scientific, medical and commercial elements of cocaine's early history are recapitulated masterfully; and his study of the supply of cocaine, and the behaviour of its users in their social milieux, constitutes major revisionism with lessons for contemporary policy. Paul Gootenberg has edited a collection of historical essays on the international supply networks of cocaine since the 1880s. Almost all are of a high standard of research, insight and analysis, and they make valuable supplementary reading to Spillane; Marcel de Kort's summary of his dissertation on Dutch cocaine history makes one wish that the full study was available in English. Although de Kort's is perhaps the most important essay in Gootenberg's collection, Mary Roldan's study of Colombia and Steven Karch on Japan are also conspicuously informative and suggestive. After the discovery in 1884 that cocaine was a superb anaesthetic in eye, nose and mouth surgery, the drug was widely adopted by American physicians in anaesthesia, as a tome for mind and body, and in the treatment of opiate addiction, alcoholism and sinus conditions. But as early as 1890 these same physicians were discarding its therapeutic use. They recognized that the habit could develop rapidly after the intiation of use, that addicts increased their doses more rapidly with cocaine than with opiates and that abstinence was often difficult. Both American and European medical experts identified cocaine with loss of self-control. "Nineteenth century opiate addicts often lived with their addictions for years without seriously impairing their family relations or their ability to work", as Spillane demonstrates. By contrast, "nearly every published case of cocaine addiction ... mentioned startling physical deterioration and associated behavioural changes". The sophistication of physicians' use of cocaine - "their attentiveness to the effects of form, dosage, route of administration and even setting" - was far superior to their introduction of chloral or the hypodermic administration of morphine which had taken place a few decades earlier. As the medical prescription of cocaine diminished, so cocaine snuffs professing to cure asthma and catarrh were strenuously marketed The cocaine content of most such products was about 5 per cent, although Ryno's Hay Fever and Catarrh Remedy was 99 per cent cocaine. Cocaine snuffs and sprays created social problems among adolescents and young men. "I have a son that has been using it and have tried for the last year to break him from it", one parent railed against Ryno's. "It is ruining our boys." Spillane uses pharmaceutical archives and the trade press to demonstrate that the increased capacity of the American pharmaceutical industry to produce, market and distribute new products popularized cocaine. By 1903, despite declining medical interest in its therapeutic use and physicians' disapproval of its unregulated distribution, American cocaine consumption had grown to five times the level of 1890. This problem contributed to the foundation of the Federal Drug Administration in 1906. Soaring consumption was not solely the result of aggressive marketing by pharmaceutical businesses. Around 1890, roustabouts toiling on the waterfronts of New Orleans and the Mississippi River "adopted cocaine as a drug compatible with the demands of hard labor and fast living". when these stevedores went to work elsewhere in the American South, they took their habits with them The managers of Southern construction camps and Mississippi River plantations used cocaine as a means of increasing production and managing their workforce. The drug was popular in Colorado mining camps by 1894. It was supplied at company stores; according to a labour organizer: "the workers, once addicted, cannot think of going away from their source of supply." In textile mills, cocaine was popularized by supervisors and employers as well as by workers themselves. This popularity among the black labouring poor led, by the end of the century, to racist panics about black "cocaine fiends" going on sexual and other rampages against white people, and after 1900 legislation against the drug's use was introduced in many localities. In America, cocaine use and attitudes to its users seem to have been distinctive. Few Europeans of this period set out to acquire the cocaine habit for pleasure or to defy the authorities. The case of Sarah Bernhardt's husband Jacques Damala was an early exception in France; but as late as 1897, the addiction expert Sir Clifford Allbutt (George Eliot's model for Dr Lydgate) had "never seen a case of cocainism m which the drug was sought from the beginning for its own sake". Yet in the US, cocaine after about 1893 joined the other vices - opium, tobacco and alcohol - favoured by prostitutes, pimps, gamblers and hoodlums in American towns and cities. The association of cocaine use with social settings and pleasure appeared to confirm that users were deliber ately seeking a deviant identity. Spillane prints a fascinating account dating from 1896 of "a cocaine joint disguised as a drugstore" operating in St Louis, Missouri. It had its sordid counterparts in all the big cities. A police investigation of 1909 identified sixty-three similar drugstores m the Tenderloin district of New York. Spillane anatomizes this distribution system with unprecedented precision. Years before state or federal laws were introduced to regulate access to cocaine, many druggists were declining to sell it in large amounts, or to certain types of customer This voluntary self-restraint accentuated the specialized and geographically specific network between cocaine suppliers and their clients. Except in vice districts, or marginal urban areas, "cocaine retailers faced critical scrutiny from within their communities The private language of the 1890s cocaine sub-culture - calling the drug coke, snow, or brighteye, for example - "highlights the functional purpose of concealing the nature of the transaction from either social or legal sanction". Spillane demonstrates that the prohibition of non-medical use of cocaine under state laws, and the federal Harrison Act of 1914, merely reinforced existing trends to underground sales, low purity, adulteration and high prices. High cocaine prices and economic crime began before Prohibition. 'Moth critics and supporters of prohibitionist policies", he concludes, equate much too facilely the acceptability and accessibility of a drug with its legal status. This easy equation was not true in the past, nor is it true today." The illicit use of cocaine in the US almost vanished in the late 1940s. However, the refusal by American leaders to treat illicit drugs "simply as commodities" that "shape and are shaped by demand and supply, exchange and consumption" has proved disastrous in the past thirty years. The co-operative programmes against marijuana cultivation and smuggling launched by the US and Mexican governments in 1969 diverted traffickers from the marijuana business to cocaine with memorable results in the 1970s and 1980s. Spillane's Cocaine shows that the better chance of reducing illicit drug consump-tion lies in commodification of the substances rather than in symbolic crusades and warrior rhetoric. Reading Joseph Spillane and Paul Gootenberg's essayists together, it seems that the United States' historical experience of cocaine has always been extreme and atypical. It is always inappropriate for Europeans to fol-low American models of drugs regulation and policing too closely. The cultural reasons that made the Americans such a special case should be a matter of imperative study. - --- MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens