Cohen David - Freud on Coke

FREUD ON COKE

by

David Cohen

Published in 2011 by

Cutting Edge Press

116 West Heath Road,

NW3 7TU

www.cuttingedgepress.co.uk

Digital Edition converted and distributed by

Andrews UK Limited

www.andrewsuk.com

David Cohen and Cutting Edge Press

David Cohen has asserted his moral rights under the 1988 Copyright and Designs and Patents Act to be identified as the author of this book.

All rights are reserved to the author and publishers. Reproduction in any form currently known or yet to be invented, or the use of any extract is only permitted with the written approval of the publishers.

Dear John, You asked me what I consider essential personal qualities in a future psychoanalyst. The answer is comparatively simple. If you want to be a real psychoanalyst you have to have a great love of the truth, scientific truth as well as personal truth, and you have to place this appreciation of truth higher than any discomfort at meeting unpleasant facts, whether they belong to the world outside or to your own inner person.

Anna Freud

I hate what the drug does to me. It makes me cry. It makes me crazy. It makes me think people are out to kill me. I hate what it does but I love it. I love the looks of it. I love the taste, I love the smell, I love the feel, I love it more than anything else I have ever loved.

A cocaine user

In memory of William S. Burroughs Junior (not his father), and all other casualties and prisoners of the War on Drugs.

I owe two large debts the first to my son Reuben Cohen, the second to my colleague Martin Hay. They played a decisive role in suggesting this book and then provided a huge amount of both personal and editorial support. Freud would have had something to say about a son editing his fathers book and I would like to thank Reuben for his work. It required delicacy as well as intelligence.

I would also like to thank Jeremy Robson who published my earlier book, The Escape of Sigmund Freud . He had every reason to expect Id offer him the chance of publishing my second book on Freud and was extremely generous when I explained why I could not.

The librarians of various institutions were very helpful especially those at the MS Collection of the Library of Congress in Washington, at the Wellcome Library in London and at the Institute of Psychoanalysis. The Wellcomes collection of the Chemist and Druggist turned out to be something of a treasure trove for illustrations of ads for various cocaine products from the 1880s.

Josh Brown has made useful suggestions and compiled the references very carefully. Vera Lustig checked for all my errors. Beth MacDougall advised on the design. My friend and agent Sonia Land was supportive as she has been with many projects, literary and not just literary. Her colleague Gaia Banks pulled off the coup of selling the Russian rights before I had finished the book, very skilful in todays difficult publishing climate. Ray Buckland typeset over the Christmas holidays. Top QWERTY indeed.

I would also like to thank Tracey who runs a wonderful shop selling illustrations, for digging out a number of advertisements for Vin Mariani.

The mistakes remain, of course, my own.

Prologue

When Billy was four years old, he watched his father shoot his mother, blowing her head off with a handgun. Following his mothers death, Billy was sent to live with his doting and protective grandparents. They lied and told the boy that his father was an explorer, his absence a matter of duty, while he mapped remote parts of South America.

As with all the best lies, there was an element of truth in this, for Billys father was hiding out in Mexico though he was eventually acquitted of murder, as he had fired the gun with his wifes consent, and had no intent of harming her. It was a party trick they called their William Tell routine. Billys father thought himself a crack marksman, and had often shot an apple off her head, while Joan giggled, high on speed. Billy saw his father only three times in the ten years after the shooting.

The French say tel pre, tel fils . At the age of thirteen, Billy himself shot a boy through the neck, nearly killing him. Billys grandparents sent him to a sanatorium for psychological rehabilitation. A year later, Billy went to live with his father in North Africa, but they did not find it easy to be around each other, and daddy was not an ideal parent to a troubled teen-age boy. He drank heavily, paid local boys for sex, and was constantly stoned on hash, heroin and opium, smoking endless cigarettes which burned down till they singed his anaesthetised fingers.

Violence and neglect took their toll. By the time he was fifteen, Billy had a drug problem too, which was hardly surprising, as his fathers sperm must have contained a veritable pharmacopeia, and his mother didnt let her pregnancy interfere with her love of amphetamines. Billy was born vulnerable to addiction and became one of the many speed freaks of the 1960s. There was more to him than drugs, though, as Billy was a gifted writer and like many addicts, not without insight into his own condition. In his words: Ive never know when to quit. Ive always wanted to continue beyond X point. That is, Ive always been kind of dumb.

One definition of dumb could be being unable to change your way of life when your way of life is killing you. If so, Billy was dumb and fixed in his dumbness, but in fact, intelligence has nothing to do with susceptibility to addiction: many addicts are hopeless failures, as are many alcoholics, yet many of both are also high-achievers. Its well-known that Winston Churchill drank from breakfast to nightcap, and experimented with amphetamines: John F. Kennedy was high on speed throughout the Cuban Missile crisis, in addition to the Demerol (known in the UK as pethidine, a powerful synthetic opiate) prescribed for his war wounds. Many famous artists, musicians and writers have been regular drug users as, indeed, has many a doctor.

Billy never managed to stop using drugs and died of liver failure when he was only 34, despite a liver transplant. By that point, his drug of choice was alcohol. His gun-toting father, who would go on to outlive his son by almost twenty years, did not go to Billys funeral.

Another drug user, Solomon, also hated funerals. He arrived late for his own fathers and gave a pathetic excuse; he could not get a barber to shave him in time. Some years later, Solomon did not attend his mothers funeral, either, though he claimed that he had always loved her.

Solomon was the son of a small businessman with a very poor head for business. Three months before Solomons birth, his grandfather had died. Solomons father was devastated as he had loved his father, even revered him. When Solomon was a toddler, his baby brother also died. Solomon had a nanny who he loved, but, when he was about three, the family sacked her for alleged theft. He missed her and then there was a new trauma. The family had to leave their comfortable house and travel to a large city where they could only afford to rent a tenement in a poor working class area. Solomon wrote later that he never lost his fear of poverty.