Jay Mike - Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the 19th Century

Mike Jay

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Publishing History

first published by Dedalus in 2000, reprinted 2005

first e-book edition in 2010

The right of Mike Jay to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

Printed in finland by WS Bookwell

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A C.I.P. listing for this book is available on request.

Mike Jay is the author of Blue Tide: The Search for Soma (1999), an investigation into the use of sacred plant drugs in Indo-European prehistory.

He is the editor of Artificial Paradises (1999), an illustrated anthology of drug literature, and the co-editor of 1900 (1999), a collection of fin-de-sicle writings on evolution, decadence, atheism, the unconscious, feminism, sexology and futurism. He has also edited, with an introduction, James S. Lees classic fin-de-sicle drug and travel memoirs, Underworld of the East (2000).

He has written on the social history of drugs for various publications including The Guardian, The Independent, Arena, Fortean Times and the International Journal of Drug Policy.

Like most people, I grew up believing that drugs were a subject without a history. Almost everything I was taught, or read, or saw on television, implied that they were something new, a plague introduced into society by hippies in the 1960s. Occasionally the curtain was pulled a little further back to reveal glimpses of Victorian opium dens, or perhaps the stupefying effects of toxic plants on primitive people. But the implication was still that drugs, even if theyd been around for a while, had always been illegal at least as soon as societies had evolved far enough to make sensible laws. These substances had only ever existed in the shadows of civilisation, and no respectable person had ever been interested in them, with the exception of the doctors and police whose job it was to stamp them out.

Since the sixties, to be sure, this orthodoxy has been challenged by a revisionist view, and with it a revisionist history; but this history has tended to focus on the distant past, assigning the exclusion of drugs from Western societies to the Catholic Church or even to the alcohol-fuelled warrior culture of the Roman Empire. Yet there is another history far closer to hand which shows us that the very idea of drugs being illegal is an extremely recent one, dating back less than a century. In 1900, any respectable person could walk into a chemist in Britain, Europe or America and choose from a range of cannabis tinctures or hashish pastes, either pure or premixed with cocaine or opium extracts; they could buy cocaine either pure or in a bewildering variety of pastilles, lozenges, wines or teas; they could order exotic psychedelics like mescaline or buy morphine or heroin over the counter, complete with hand-tooled syringes and injection kits.

Within the span of history this was only yesterday, and yet we hear surprisingly little of this recent story from either side of the highly polarised drug debate. For the sixties counterculture or at least their evangelical spokesmen it was important to stress that theirs was the first generation to discover drugs, and that this discovery marked an unprecedented, even evolutionary shift in human consciousness. Their opponents across the barricades were more than happy to collude with this rhetoric of novelty: it enabled them to stress the importance of counter-revolution, the unknown potential of drugs to aid and abet the breakdown of society, and the urgency of diverting unprecedented levels of government funding to combat the new drug menace.

And yet, throughout the reign of Queen Victoria and the height of Empire an era regarded by many as the golden age of our civilisation the West was awash with these substances; in fact, it was only when the dream of Empire began to fail that the movement to question their legitimacy began. In 1800, Humphry Davys experiments with nitrous oxide marked the beginning of the modern understanding of the drug experience, and by 1821 Thomas de Quinceys Confessions of an English Opium Eater had brought this understanding into mass popular culture. Yet it was not until 1900 that efforts to prohibit drugs began to take hold at an international level, and not until 1921 that these efforts were fully enshrined in law. The century in between, typically regarded as an era of repression, moral probity and social control, could also be billed as Drug Legalisation: The first Hundred Years.

This is the century on which this book focuses, and its aim is to trace the origins of the drugs which emerged in the West in the nineteeth century. How did these substances, now an all-pervasive multi-billion-dollar black market phenomenon, first arrive in the modern world? Who were the first people to experience their effects, how were these effects originally interpreted, and how did they spread into the broader culture? My primary motive for this enquiry is simply amazement that these pioneer stories are so rarely told: this is the first volume in English to relate them all together in any detail. Not only are these first encounters crucial to our understanding of what these drugs are and how and why people use them, but they also plumb a fabulously rich vein of explorers tales, secret histories and weird scenes which combine to assemble a hallucinatory alternate narrative of the nineteenth century itself.

Ive traced these stories with the drugs in question as the protagonists, following their arrival and picaresque progress through a world which was as new to them as they were to us. Drugs like art, or science, or philosophy only take hold within a culture once a sea-change is under way which transforms them from their previous irrelevant or inconceivable selves into a focus for a new sensibility. In the period from 1800 to 1900, the discovery of drugs continually mirrored other transformations rich and strange, and vigorously encouraged strangeness with new and mind-expanding experiences. These whether farcical or profound, courageous or deranged demonstrated repeatedly that human consciousness might include dimensions, even universes, previously undreamed of. Most previous historical work on drugs in the nineteenth century has shown little interest in the ideas and visions they generated, concentrating instead on more familiar and measurable processes like their supply, commoditisation, public perception or statutory control; these are all important elements of the story, but my aim here also includes building up a picture of the subjective world opened up by each drug and its personal effect on those who took it. Without this dimension, the responses of the drugtakers of the nineteenth century are too easily dismissed as reckless self-indulgence, juvenile aberration or deviant pathology. With it, we begin to sense the courage or hubris which was required not to dismiss or condemn these extraordinary and novel states of consciousness but to explore them further, to attempt the quixotic task of explaining them to the sober world, even to seek new roles for them scientific or poetic, medical or social within it.