Food of the Gods: Synthetics: Heroin and Cocaine
SYNTHETICS: HEROIN, COCAINE, AND TELEVISION
Morphine was isolated in 1805 by the young German chemist Friedrich Serturner. For Serturner morphine was the purest essence of the poppy plant; he named it after Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams. It was this success in isolating the essence of the opium poppy that inspired chemists to attempt the isolation of pure compounds from other proven materia medica. Drugs for the relief of heart disease were isolated from foxglove. Quinine was extracted from the cinchona tree, purified, and used in the colonial conquest of the malarial zone. And from the leaves of a South American bush was extracted a new and promising local anesthetic-cocaine.
Morphine use was restricted and sporadic until after the middle of the nineteenth century. At first its major non-medical use was as a vehicle of suicide, but this phase was brief and soon morphine was established as a new and very different sort of drug. In 1853 Alexander Wood invented the hypodermic syringe. Before its invention, physicians had used the hollow stems of the lilac plant to introduce drugs inside the body. The syringe arrived just in time to be used to inject morphine into soldiers wounded in the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War. This established a pattern that we will meet again in the history of opiates-the pattern of war as vector of addiction.
By 1890 use of morphine on the battlefield had resulted in significant addict populations in both Europe and the United States. So many Civil War veterans returned home as addicts to injectable morphine that yellow journalists referred to morphine addiction as "the soldier's disease."
HARD NARCOTICS
Distilled alcohol and white sugar had preceded morphine as examples of high purity addictive compounds, but morphine set the pattern for the modern "hard drugs," meaning highly addictive injectable narcotics. At first such drugs were derived from opiates, but all too soon cocaine joined the list. Once heroin, invented as a cure for morphine addiction, was introduced, it quickly replaced morphine as the synthetic opiate of choice among addicts. Heroin has retained this position throughout the twentieth century.
Heroin also quickly replaced all other drugs in the public fantasy concerning the evils of drug addiction. Even to this day, with statistics showing that alcohol kills ten times more often than heroin, heroin addiction is still viewed as the depths of drug depravity. There are two reasons for this view.
One reason is the actual addictive power of heroin. The craving for heroin and the illegal or violent acts that the craving may induce have given heroin the reputation as a drug whose addicts will kill for it. Tobacco addicts might kill for their fix, too, if they had to, but instead they simply walk out to a 7-Eleven to buy cigarettes.
The other reason for the distaste with which heroin addiction is viewed is the characteristics of the intoxicated state. Immediately after his shot the heroin addict is cheerful, almost ebullient. This active response to the shot quickly gives way to the "nod" or "nodding out." The junkie's goal with each shot of junk is to "get the nod on," to get into the detached state of twilight sleep in which the long reveries of the opiates can unfurl themselves. In this state there is no pain, no regret, no distraction, and no fear. Heroin is the perfect drug for anyone who has been damaged by lack of self-esteem or traumatized by historical upheaval. It is a drug of battlefields, concentration camps, cancer wards, prisons, and ghettos. It is the drug of the resigned and the dissolute, the surely dying and the victims unwilling or unable to fight back:
Junk is the ideal product. . . the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy. . . . The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client. He pays his staff in junk. Junk yields a basic formula of "evil" virus: The Algebra of Need. The face of "evil" is always the face of total need. A dope fiend is a man in total need of dope. Beyond a certain frequency need knows absolutely no limit or control. In the words of total need: "Wouldn't you? Yes, you would. You would lie, cheat, inform on your friends, steal, do anything to satisfy total need. Because you would be in a state of total sickness, total possession, and not in a position to act in any other way. Dope fiends are sick people who cannot act other than they do. A rabid dog cannot choose but bite.
COCAINE: THE HORROR OF THE WHITENESS
Like heroin, cocaine is a modern high-purity drug derived from a plant with a long history of folk use. For millennia the peoples of the montane rain forests of South America have held cultural values that promote the ritual and religious use of the stimulant/food coca. Locals in areas where coca has traditionally been cultivated and used will immediately tell one, "Cocci no es un droga, es comida." Coca is not a drug, it is food. And indeed this appears to be largely the case. The self-administered doses of ground coca dust contain a significant percentage of the daily requirement of vitamins and minerals. Coca also is a powerful appetite suppressant.
The importance of these facts cannot be appreciated without an understanding of the situation regarding protein availability in the Amazonian forest and Andean Altipano. 'The casual traveler might suppose that the lushness of the tropical forest signifies an abundance of fruits, edible seeds, and roots. This is not the ease. Competition for available protein resources is so fierce among the thousands of species of life that comprise the jungle biota that nearly all usable organic materials are actually bound in living systems. Human penetration into such an environment is greatly aided by an appetite-suppressing plant.
Of course appetite suppression is only one characteristic of coca use. The important characteristic is stimulation. The climaxed rain forest is a difficult place to inhabit. Gathering food and building shelter often requires carrying large amounts of material over considerable distances. Often the machete is the only tool to hold the rain forest at bay.
To the ancient Inca culture of Peru, and later to the indigenous people and the mestizo colonistas, coca was a goddess, a kind of New World echo of Graves's white goddess Leucothea. Significantly, the goddess Mama Coca as a young girl, offering the saving branch of coca to the Spanish conqueror, figures prominently in the frontispiece of W. Golden Mortimer's classic History of Coca: The Divine Plant of the Incas {see Figure 22).
In 1859 cocaine was isolated for the first time. Pharmacology was undergoing a kind of renaissance, and research with cocaine was vigorously pursued over the next several decades.
At this point in our discussion it seems hardly necessary to mention that cocaine was first hailed as an obvious cure for morphinism! Medical researchers who were attracted to the new drug included the young Sigmund Freud:
At present it is impossible to assess with any certainty to what extent coca can be expected to increase human mental powers. I have the impression that protracted use of coca can lead to a lasting improvement if the inhibitions manifested before it is taken are due only to physical causes or to exhaustion. To be sure, the instantaneous effect of a dose of coca cannot be compared with that of a morphine injection; but, on the good side of the ledger, there is no danger of general damage to the body as is the case with the chronic use of morphine.
Freud's findings, which he would later repudiate, were neither very widely publicized nor well received where they were noticed. It was a fellow student of Freud's in Vienna, Carl Koller, who took the next step in the medical application of cocaine, the discovery of its use as a local anesthetic. Overnight Roller's discovery revolutionized surgery; by 1885 cocaine was being hailed as a tremendous medical breakthrough. However, as its use spread, its action as an addiction-inducing stimulant was also noted. Cocaine was the inspiration for the unnamed drug that causes sudden personality change in Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—a fact that contributed to its fast-accruing reputation as a virulent new vice of the wealthy and depraved.
PRO COCAINE
Not all literary references to cocaine portrayed it in such a horrific light. In 1888 British physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a now-famous short novel, The Sign of Four, in which his detective, the redoubtable Sherlock Holmes, comments on his use of cocaine: "I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. I find it, however, so transcendingly stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a matter of small amount."
Coca followed the pattern already set with coffee, tea, and chocolate; that is, it quickly attracted entrepreneurial attention. Chief among those who saw commercial opportunities in coca was a Frenchman, M. Angelo Mariani. In 1888 the first bottle of Vin Mariani was marketed (see Figure 23), and soon there was an entire line of coca-based and -laced wines, tonics, and elixirs: Mariani was the greatest exponent of the virtues of coca the world has ever known. He steeped himself in coca lore, surrounded himself with Incan artifacts, cultivated a coca garden at his home, and directed a merchandising empire that featured his tonic wine. Through his genius for advertising he came closer to "turning on the World" than any man who ever lived. Queen Victoria, Pope Leo XIII, Sarah Bernhardt, Thomas Edison, and hundreds of other celebrities and medical men gave public testimony to the tonic properties of his products in a series of twelve volumes published by his company.
MODERN ANTI-DRUG HYSTERIA
In the United States at the turn of the century, racist rumor mongering fanned the hysterical fear that southern blacks, maddened by cocaine, might attack whites. In 1906 the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed; it made cocaine and heroin illegal and set the stage for the legally sanctioned suppression of the synthetic and addictive compounds found in the opium poppy and the coca bush. In contrast to tobacco, tea, and coffee, which were initially resisted and then made legal, morphine/heroin and cocaine began their career in modern society as legal substances but once recognized as addictive were suppressed. Why these drugs and not others? Was the addiction more virulent? Was the use of the hypodermic injection somehow offensive? Or was there some difference in the social and psychological effect of these drugs that made them scapegoats for the damage being done to society by alcohol and tobacco? These are difficult questions, not amenable to easy answers. Yet, if we are to understand the different climate of drug markets and drug use in the twentieth century, these are the questions we must attempt to answer.
Part of the answer may lie in the fact that by the beginning of the twentieth century nearly a hundred years of experience with the social consequences of addictive synthetic drugs was behind us. The cheerful folly of hailing each new pharmacological discovery as a universal panacea had been amply demonstrated. What could be ignored or left undocumented in the eighteenth or even nineteenth century could not be so easily hidden in the twentieth. Ever more rapid communication and transportation networks spread information about the drugs as well as the drugs themselves (Figure 24).
These technologies helped lead to efficiently organized and administered large-scale criminal syndicates. Yet the rise of these syndicates and of modern narcotics production and distribution systems also required connivance on the part of governments. Hard drug addiction had given the drug trade a blackened reputation. Governments that had dealt drugs with impunity for centuries suddenly found themselves, in the new atmosphere of temperance and social reform, forced to legislate this lucrative trade out of the realm of ordinary commerce and into the status of an illicit activity. Governments would now make their drug money in kickback schemes and in situations in which they would be paid to "look the other way."
DRUGS AND GOVERNMENTS
Government involvement in and direct responsibility for the drug trade would diminish, with protection rackets replacing direct earnings, while retail prices would rise astronomically. The new price structure made the drug money pie large enough for all parties to profit handsomely—governments and criminal syndicates alike.
In effect, the modern solution has been for the drug cartels to operate as proxies for national governments in the matter of supplying addictive narcotics. Governments can no longer participate openly in the world narcotic trade and claim legitimacy. Only pariah governments operate without fronts. Legitimate governments prefer to have their intelligence agencies cut secret deals with the drug mafiosi while the visible machinery of diplomacy seems all aflutter over the "drug problem"— a problem always presented in such terms as to convince any reasonable person of its utter insolubility. It is significant that the major production areas of hard narcotics are "tribal zones." Modern imperialists would have us believe that, try as they might, they have never been able to overrun and control these areas, in Pakistan and Burma for example, where major production of opium occurs. Consequently, faceless tribal leaders, ever changing and with unpronounceable names, can be held responsible for it all.
From 1914 until World War II, drug distribution was largely in the same hands of the gangsters who directed other illicit operations that characterize gangster subculture: prostitution, loan sharking, and various rackets. The prohibition of alcohol in the United States had created a vast windfall market for hard narcotics, as well as offering the opportunity for easy profits from alcohol manufactured illegally and sold untaxed.
Government manipulation of drug markets occurred elsewhere, too. During World War II the Japanese occupiers of Manchuria took a page from the book of British colonial oppression of a century earlier and produced vast amounts of opium and heroin for distribution inside China.
This was done, not with an eye to profit, as in the British case, but with the intent of creating so many addicts that the will of the Chinese people to resist the occupation effectively would be broken. Later, during the 1960s, the Central Intelligence Agency would use the same technique to smother political dissent in American black ghettos under an avalanche of No. 4 China White—heroin of extraordinary purity.
DRUGS AND INTERNATIONAL INTELLIGENCE
The virulence of addictions to synthetics like heroin and cocaine could not long escape the attention of the inheritors of the slave trade and the opium wars—international intelligence agencies and secret police organizations. These shadowy groups have an insatiable need for untraceable money to fund the private armies, terrorist cells, coups d'etat, and front groups that are their stock in trade.
Involvement in, and indeed domination of, the world narcotics trade has proven irresistible to groups such as the CIA, Opus Dei, and the French secret service: The U.S. Government's Mafia and narcotics connection goes back, as is well known, to World War II. Two controversial joint operations between OSS (Office of Strategic Services) and ONI (U.S. Naval Intelligence) established contacts (via Lucky Luciano) with the Sicilian Mafia and (via Tai Li) with the dope-dealing Green Gang of Tu Yueh-Sheng in Shanghai. Both connections were extended into the post-war period.
The involvement of legitimate institutions remains the same with certain exceptions. In the late 1970s, there was a move in American hard drug culture from emphasis on heroin to emphasis on cocaine. This move was in part a logical consequence of the American military defeat in Vietnam and retraction from Southeast Asia. It was soon reinforced when the Reagan agenda of contra support and narcoterrorism opened new frontiers for covert operations.
Yet it is unlikely that the virulence or social cost of the cocaine epidemic was ever anticipated. Perhaps no one ever asked the question "What are the consequences of hooking the American public on cocaine?" Perhaps the development of smokable, more efficient, and more addictive crack cocaine was unexpected. It is highly likely that the phenomenon of crack is an instance of technology having escaped from the control of its creators. In the 1980s cocaine assumed a form more virulent than any of its earlier victims and detractors could have possibly imagined.
This is a new and disturbing pattern in the evolution of human-drug interactions—a pattern that cannot be ignored. If today we are confronted by a super addictive form of cocaine, why not tomorrow a super addictive form of heroin? In fact, such forms of heroin already exist. Fortunately they are simply not as easy to manufacture as is crack cocaine. Ice, a smokable form of highly addictive methamphetamine, has appeared in the drug underground. There will be other drugs in the future—more addictive, more destructive than anything now possible.
How, then, will law and society respond to this phenomenon? It is to be hoped the response won't be one of self-righteously holding the addicts up as examples of contemptible behavior.
From a historical point of view, restricting the availability of addictive substances must be seen as a peculiarly perverse example of Calvinist dominator thought—a system in which the sinner is to be punished in this world by being transformed into an exploitable, hapless customer, who is punished for addiction by being relieved of his cash, by the criminal/governmental combine that provides the addictive substances. The image is more horrifying than that of the serpent that devours itself—it is once again the Dionysian image of the mother who devours her children, the image of a house divided against itself.
