Andrada Fătu-Tutoveanu

Universitatea Transilvania, Braşov, România

andrada_f@yahoo.com

 

 

Disenchanting Drugs. Science, Cultural Paradigm Switch and Prohibition (1900-1920)

 

 

Abstract: The transgression in the field of drugs from religion to science took place during the 19^th century (especially after the 1850s) and culminated within the first two decades of the 20^th century. This process was therefore in a way “delayed” in comparison to other transfers of the sort, which had taken place in the western world. The present study uses as a point of depart the matrix of the process known as the “disenchantment of the world”, in Max Weber’s and Marcel Gauchet’s terms: the idea of reconfiguration of the universe on scientific (and therefore opposed to religious) bases. The “new” world (dominated by the scientific prescription – a sort of “medical imperialism”, see Gossop, 47) represents a totally different environment, where religious belief or magical structure cannot longer function as the ultimate authority, but lose precisely their “power” and gradually enter in a sort of incongruence to the new reality. The first laws concerning drugs (issued around 1914-1916) have been influenced by the pressure of scientific discoveries and have also contributed to the recognition and consolidation of the medical authority, which in terms of dominance has become the “new religion”.

Keywords: Magic; Science; Toxicology; “Disenchantment of drugs“; Prohibition.

 

 

Narcotics represent a key subject in the process of changing or abandoning the religious mentality in favour of science. Their controversial, religion-laden history has had a problematic evolution in the European imaginary, being considered mysterious substances, generally forbidden by rituals[1] and always on the edge of official acceptance. As we tried to show in a previous study[2], the 19^th century was the ground where the battle between two mentalities was fought: what we can call the religious/witchcraft paradigm step by step replaced by the developing toxicology (the science of poisons). Formulas and laboratory experiments have come to replace the mystery of witchcraft and its “dangerous chemistry”, despite the survival of some former religious obsessions (messianic panacea, “dark idol,” and so on), transferred to the medical context and vocabulary. The present study focuses on the departure which took place at the beginning of the 20^th century[3] and the official recognition of the scientific authority through a new political and legal discourse on drugs.

The transgression from religion (as a type of mentality and not as a reference to Christianity or other particular representation of it), to science in the field of drugs has been in a way “delayed” in comparison to other replacements of the sort which have taken place much earlier in the western world. The matrix is that of the very well known process of “disenchantment of the world”, in Max Weber’s and Marcel Gauchet’s terms: that of reconfiguring the universe on scientific and therefore, opposed to religious bases. The “new” world represents a totally different environment, where religious beliefs can no longer function as the ultimate authority, but lose their “power” and enter in a sort of incompatibility to the new reality. The concept of “disenchantment” speaks very well of this “spell” that was lost and turned into the obsession (and power) of facts and scientific knowledge. “Science, it has been said, has displaced religion, made the old creeds incredible, and this is what transformed public life. The crisis felt by many believing Christians in the nineteenth century after the publication of Darwin’s theories is taken as a paradigm expression of the process at work. In the twentieth century this view has tended to give way to theories of the second sort. The influence of Durkheim was important here. On this view, religion is more than just a set of beliefs. It is a pattern of practices that gives a certain shape to our social imaginary. Religion – or, as Durkheim liked to put it, the sense of the sacred – is the way we experience or belong to the larger social whole. […] Gauchet’s story is not one of development […] rather, it is a story of the breakdown of religion, a kind of break-up trough stages which eventually gave us a social reality quite opposite to the one that existed at the outset.” (Taylor, x-xi) This “history of civilized forms of thinking, of philosophy working its way from myth, through theological speculation, to practical science [emphasize added]” (Gauchet, 53) speaks about this change in authority that affects the status and perception of drugs.

The timing had to do precisely with the evolution of toxicology and organic chemistry in general[4], which appeared and evolved during the 19^th century in parallel to an entire cultural “obsession” for drugs. Toxicology emerged and was developed during the “golden age” of drugs and particularly of opiates, its birth and blooming being favoured by the evolution of complementary sciences such as mainly chemistry. “Organic chemistry was, at the beginning of the 19^th century, an almost unknown area. Discoveries regarding organic bodies have accumulated from the Middle Ages. […] Still, the chemist lacked the necessary keys for the study of organic chemistry. When he discovered these, the evolution of this discipline would take place with an amazing rapidity.” (Vidal, 71) The “mystery” of hallucinogens was from now one to be at first described, then classified and later put in formulas, and this way “disenchanted”.

Scientists, who were making the history of science, had to face both the uncertainties and restrictive means of pioneering work but also, on the other hand, the astonishing discoveries made through their experiments. This is also the period of the discovery of synthetic derivates of opium (opiates such as morphine, accessible trough the invention of the hypodermic needle, and later heroine) or of other substances (such as the coca plant, which led to cocaine). The first wave of enthusiasm about such powerful new substances – often seen as “miraculous” panacea – was almost in every case followed by the later acknowledgment of some “diabolic” effects (for instance, while morphine, heroine or cocaine were functioning as excellent means to anaesthesia, they also proved highly addictive). The inevitable oscillation bears the name of iatrogenesis[5] and sometimes drugs involved an entire chain of such ambivalent effects: for instance, “cocaine was prescribed against the effects of morphine, which had itself been used to fight a painful illness” (Yvorel, 159). Now, by penetrating and investigating a world which had previously been considered to belong to magic, “the science of experts meets a dark, fascinating and tragic world, which confronts them to the feeling of their imperious limits, which no will, no matter how frenetic, doesn’t reach to push forward” (Chauvaud, 192-193). So, science (as the “new religion”) was rapidly winning ground, but – as any form of religion and extrapolating, any form of power – had both fervent adepts and enemies and was also making its first victims.

We perceive as fluid and oscillatory the process of transferring the drug from what we call the witchcraft paradigm to the scientific net of concepts and factual data. One argument is that of the persistence of some inherited/latent religious archetypal markers, emerging into the unsettled ground of the newly born scientific perspective. The “obsessions” remain, being preserved (as a form of “residue of religion”, if we could use here Gauchet’s terms [201]) and sometimes adopted by the new imagery. The vocabulary is not yet specialised and one would still perceive therapeutic qualities as “miraculous”, “divine” (under the obsession of the “cure all”, the panacea), while the addictive powers of substances were seen as “demonic” and “dark”.

Thomas Szasz is an authority in regard to the confrontation (on the field of drugs) in terms of power and control between the religious (theocracy) and scientific (therapeutic) authorities. Szasz speaks of an act of simple replacement in terms of ideology and vocabulary, but of maintenance of the same dominance structure. The replacements take place in an almost perfect equivalence and can be associated, we think, to some religious scenarios within which gods changed their names and appearance, but maintain their functions – in disguise. The pairs are, for instance: religious/ Christian versus scientific/ medical ideology, priests/ physicians, heretics/ sorcerers, quacks, faith/ scientific knowledge, hope/ scientific research, charity/ treatment, holy water/ therapeutic drugs, Satan/ Christian science and everything that defies the medical authority, sorcerers’ substances or chemistry/ the “hard drugs”, Inquisition/ institutional psychiatry. We could add another of Szasz’s observations which is here significant for the paradoxical idea of continuity in the change of paradigms of the imaginary: that there is one thing that different religions and parties agree on – the “scientific fact” that certain substances are dangerous (see Szasz, 11). An important idea refers to the 20^th century anti-addiction treatment, the author writes that “a religious scenario was adapted to medical terms” (“as the Christian West once confronted the problem of witchcraft, so now the Scientific World confronts the problem of drugcraft [emphasize added]”, Szasz, xvi). Interesting enough, the author is against the appropriation of drugs (as hallucinogens) by science, going against the mainstream and considering this to be a “ceremonial” issue and not a scientific one.

One of the main ideas we find essential when speaking about the switch to science in this context of power and dominance is that of prohibition. Drugs or hallucinogens have, within the history of culture, a long and complicated evolution, which at various stages entailed certain limitations.

Some were ritualised, such as a religious shamanic/witchcraft restriction referring to the non-initiated person dealing with drugs, while others were more pragmatic, having to do with commercial development and monopoly of drug market[6]. We are interested here in the phenomenon of drug prohibition in the Western Europe cultures at the beginning of the 20^th century as opposed to the free circulation during the previous period. We shall refer mainly to opiates and their later adversary, cocaine. Opium, known to Europeans, had had a “medical record” in Western Europe before the 19^th century but its spread has increased during the period because of two main factors: on one hand, the increased commerce to the Orient and the increased opium market in the Far East colonies and, on the other hand, the development of chemistry and toxicology, and therefore the appearance of all sort of synthetic derivates and substances. Primarily encouraged and supported by the British and French empires, which used to find cheaper to use Indian opium in commercial exchanges with China, the Oriental “vice” of opium smoking has also developed in the European colonial milieus, in ports and so on and eventually became a European fashion. Within the artistic environment the drug was part of new cultural programmes, and has remained so from Romanticism to Surrealism, the 19^th century being a privileged age for such a perspective, in the absence of any sort of prohibition: “the drug was not yet sanctioned by the social apparatus, nor by the medical one, which was regularly prescribing it. It is therefore unconceivable to speak of a taboo or about transgressing values: the forbidden did not exist [emphasize added]” (de Liedekerke, 48, 58).

The turn of the century will be the first step toward a different mentality. One of the obsessions anguishing the turn of the century establishment (degeneration) was strongly associated to drugs. The counterpart of the artistic fin de siècle attitude was this fear of moral and national decay, drugs being part of it, especially through the image of the demonic “opium den”. As far as cocaine is concerned, the prohibition was also inexistent and this rather recently discovered substance “was regarded in Britain [and not only there] as a useful element of the pharmacopoeia […]. Risks associated with its use were recognized but were perceived to be largely confined to a particular category of person […] highly strung, vulnerable to mental or intellectual pressure and of relatively high social standing.” (Kohn, 105)

The legal background on the problem of drugs was frail: just a few general mentions about toxic substances in general, relating to the poisoning issue. The birth of toxicology and its (sometimes slow) progress offer a new perspective to 19^th century justice in this respect. Some judiciary cases involving for instance morphine addicts[7] (a category which appeared[8], just as the heroin or cocaine addicts precisely during this period and due to its “discoveries”) make clear that there was an ambiguity towards this problem[9], also delicate because of its economic intricacies.

The context in which mentalities changed, favouring the discourse of prohibition, is quite complex, as one should bear in mind a few defining moments distinct episodes (the “turn of the century” moment, “la Belle Époque,” and the First World War). If we look at these moments comparatively, from the point of view of the cultural perspective on drugs, we could notice in the fin de siècle discourse a first step towards prohibition, as the “obsession” of degeneration and decadence comprises drugs both at the level of fascination and at that of fear. On the other hand, the fin de siècle, de race, de monde themselves are also that of the “Golden Age” of drugs. During this assumed Götterdämmerung, the artificial ecstasy also functions as an analgesic (against this refined and anesthetised agony which is the melancholy of fin de siècle). At another level, it is the “elixir” of ecstatic (and aesthetic) experiences: taking drugs as an artistic “self-poisoning” gesture. The 1900 high life is – par excellence – drug addicted.

The beginning of the new century is marked by an atmosphere of distrust – of a subtle disillusion or “disenchantment”- as far as the great previous chemical discoveries were concerned. As we have already said, scientists, especially during the second half of the nineteenth century had tried to synthetically embody the long-lasting obsession of a cure all, bringing a religious and magic theme to the world of formulas. They were exhilarated by the discovery of strong substances such as heroin or cocaine, but later found the addictive “demon”: with each substance, the illusion of the absolute as far as drugs were concerned gradually faded away. The fin de siècle is the last self-delusional moment on this history of missed panacea. The new century nourishes less illusion and has more certainties and this is reflected by the very soon to be born medical and legal “witch-hunt” directed against drugs. Until the first decade of the 20^th century, the problem of drugs was somehow in the background of the political discourse and interest, being more a cultural (and ceremonial, if we quote Szasz) and, on the other hand, an economic issue.

In the dawn of the new century the perspective of the establishment over drug use starts changing. The first international meeting on the subject took place in Shanghai in February, 1890, and had been initiated by the US. At the moment, the context was not yet stabilized in the matter of convergence of opinions (see Yvorel, 236). Only in a few years time[10], before the First World War, a clearer reforming political discourse on the subject was emerging. Having been appropriated more and more by laboratories and the medical literature and therefore labelled and demystified, drugs had become a “serious matter”. Under the sign of the “opium den” danger, a second conference on the subject takes place in Hague (The 1912 “Hague International Opium Convention”) and between 1911 and 1913, legal reform projects focused increasingly on the situation of drugs, which have become an “issue” and called for an answer. Still, not only smoked opium was considered, but also cocaine, morphine, ether, hashish etc., as the scientific “disillusionment” had made them all lose their aura and show their “dark side”.

The war created (or helped creating) an even larger breach: “that perception changed within the space of a few months during the First World War, when the drug was identified as a threat to soldiers. It was banned under emergency regulations, which were transferred to permanent legislation after the war” (Kohn,105). The first legal measures against drugs can be associated therefore with the beginning of the First World War. Having adopted in 1906 The Pure Food and Drug Act (a document regulating and labelling different substances including cocaine and heroine), the United States went further and promulgated in 1914 the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act[11], imposing control and limitation on these specific substances. In Europe, the first legal measures are connected to this act, a very influent one on further drug legislation. In France: “until 1914, excepting particular measures against opium den owners and the 1908 decree on the selling of opium[12], the 1845 law on toxic substances was the only one. It was not enough. Actually, this text referred only to ‘brutal or slow poisoning, as a death instrument’, but by no means to volunteering self poisoning, that is to drug addiction.” (de Liedekerke 177). In November 1913 a complex project of law was submitted against opium smoking, but also against the possession and selling of drugs. On July 12, 1916, the law was adopted, which meant “the end of the golden era or belle époque of opium” (de Liedekerke 178).

“The approach to this issue in the UK was less harsh. Throughout most of the 19^th century, opiates had been freely available. … Laws were [later] introduced to restrict the availability of specific preparations of these drugs. […] The influence of the recently passed Harrison Act, and the increasing pressure applied by the medical profession to limit this form of self-medication, furthered the trend towards legal control [emphasis added]” (Gossop 165). The context, the war, had also been essential to this urge to establish rules on drugs: the use of such substances by soldiers (both by enemy and national troops) seemed a major problem and they led to “fears about the potential threat that such drugs might pose to national security and they were prohibited under the Defence of the Realm Act.“ (165).

Legal boundaries were therefore established around 1914-1916 in Western countries, but started functioning only as an instrument, while the only authority to determine the actual production/use/limitation was that of science. The new control formula was based on medical prescription, which had actually become the ultimate “law”, outplaying any appeal to moral/religious retrains. The new keywords were medical prescription and therapeutic need (versus recreational use, which was banished as “unhealthy”, a term now replacing the traditional “evil”) (see Yvorel, 45, 47, 237-239). “The distinction between good and bad has been largely replaced by that of healthy and unhealthy […]. Whatever is deemed by medical bureaucrats to be healthy is therefore good, correct.” (Gossop, 47).

To conclude, we need to emphasize once more the importance of this moment (the first decades of the 20^th century) in this cultural paradigm switch – for what we call the “new religion” takes now control and is officially acknowledged as dominant. With the establishment of the legal ultimate boundary, the “illusions” of magic (preserved by the early stages of 19^th century toxicology and medicine) were now fully “disenchanted” and the new vocabulary and approach of the establishment are no longer tributary to the “divine drogue/noir idole” paradigm. In other words, the “unholy traffic” (National Druggist, qtd. in Spillane, 36) has now turned into an “illicit” or “illegal” one. In the same terms of dominance (religious, “ceremonial” versus medical, scientific)[13], we can conclude by making use of an even stronger formula defining this transfer of power from religion to science and the new age which has then started – it was the era of “medical imperialism” (Gossop, 47).

 

 

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Notes