Hope this setup isn’t too long. A co-worker and I were talking at lunch and the converstion got around to “the drug problem”. My co-worker is a nice lady but not really well educated, at least in the history or literature dept. She said that drugs were worse now, people “didn’t use them like that in the old days.” So I gave her a number of historical instances of prevelant drug use(not forgetting alcohol), and I mentioned how Edgar Allen Poe allegedly abused drugs, and the fictional Sherlock Holmes was a cocaine addict, until he got off it. And there was a quote from Robert Heinlein who had said that in his college days in the 20’s he could name at least three places where you could get “you name it.” My sister the pharmacist once showed me a scrapbook borrowed from a professor who collected antique doctor’s prescriptions. It’s an eyeopener to see all the heroin, morphine and cocaine being prescribed, and presumably some folks got hooked by their doctors. My friend was suprised. What other 1930’s or before addicts can be named(fictional or real)?
Well, William Burroughs was born in 1914, so it’s very possible he may have been a junky before 1930…
How about Lewis Carroll?
I have heard that Sigmund Freud did some of the initial medical research to study the use of cocaine as a local anesthetic. He also used it himself as an amphetamine to stay up all night while he wrote out reports and studies. I think he took it by injection. Eventually he realized he was addicted: one morning he woke up and discovered that he had worked all night, but all he had done was write pages and pages of gibberish. And so he had to wean himself back off the cocaine.
I’m pretty sure I read this story in a biographical work, but I can’t absolutely vouch for it. I do firmly remember that he used cocaine pretty heavily one way or another.
Hermann Goering was a serious drug addict by the time he commanded the Luftwaffe. I’m not sure when he got started, but it very likely could have been when he was flying in WW I.
Didn’t Freud originally prescribe cocaine for melancholia (depression). But it was a while before people decided that the cure was much worse than the disease, (at least after the first couple hours)
Wasn’t the guy who wrote Alice in Wonderland an opium addict?
Well, no thread about literary drug use would be complete without a mention of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his opium dream.
Me:
Shit. That was me. Sorry.
I refer you to the Opium Wars. Just do a net search. They date back to the 1830s.
I thought this thread was going to contain stories on your misspent youths.
Oh well, maybe next time.
I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this site but FWIW
Thanks, yojimbo, for that site. I can check it out but I did notice one item for the author William Burroughs. It credited him with being the author of I, Claudius. I have that book, and it’s sequel, Claudius the God, and the author is Robert Graves.
The site overall seemed a bit silly - I don’t know if it’s trying to say that drugs are actually good, because all of these wonderful people used drugs. A bit like those lists of famous vegetarians that, depending on the viewpoint of the person compiling them, will include either Jesus or Hitler. And having someone like Bela Lugosi, whose addiction to morphine was part of what ruined his career, on the list, is a little disingenuous.
As a slight aside, William Burroughs didn’t start using morphine until he was about thirty, towards the end of WWII, and he moved on to heroin afterwards, because of its availability after the war. His novel ‘Junky’ is an excellent account of what is wrong with drug abuse, although, paradoxically, I’ve known people who have decided to use drugs after reading it. Strokes for folks, I guess.
HenrySpencer.
Freud thought cocaine was wondrous stuff! It got people off of morphine kicks 
-Sam
Read Aleister Crowley’s novel DIARY OF A DRUG FIEND for an entertaining look at cocaine/heroin addiction amongst the British upper classes in the years following World War I.
Did someone say drugs? Maybe I was just having a flashback…
Hey Baker, ask your friend if her parents and grandparents ever told her about the good old days. You know, when they used to get up at 3am to do chores, then walk five miles uphill to school, in the snow, in their father pyjamas… both ways. Ask if they talked about being really poor with no food and having to eat dirt. Did they ever talk about having to work until midnight before they could get to bed?
This is sure evidence that drug use was rampant in the good old days. Straight people would never say things like this but we accept it from the old folks, they aren’t rambling but having flashbacks to a time when they were all doing drugs.