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A SIN, A CRIME, A VICE OR A DISEASE?
trial that involved severing cutaneous nerves in Head’s forearm to
measure their regeneration rate. He believed firmly, however, that
‘introspection could be made fruitful by the personal experience of a
trained observer only’.13 He adopted Kraepelin’s method of ‘ergographs’, datasets generated by repeated experiments at regular intervals, with variables controlled as far as possible. He noted from his own
experience, however, that self-experiment with drugs created feedback
loops that were impossible to eliminate. Some trials interested him
more than others, and his results were inevitably skewed by ‘the interest
and excitement produced by taking a substance when the discovery of
its effect is the motive of the whole experiment’:
The ergographic curve is an extremely delicate reagent to any form
of mental excitement. Any novelty in the course of an experiment
may have a very decided effect on the amount of work. The interest
of a conversation, the knowledge that the performance is being
watched, the view of the weight [on the dynamometer] rising as
one works or of the formation of the ergogram on the drum, or any
other routine of the daily experiment, may have very obvious effects
on the amount of work . . . The interest so aroused will probably
be great whether the drug is unknown, so that there is an element
of mystery in the occurrence, or whether its nature is known. When
in the latter case the subject is himself the experimenter, keenly
interested in the possible results of the experiment, this factor of
interest must often be very strong.
14
As Freud had observed twenty years earlier, self-experiment made
contradictory demands on scientists: they were obliged to be both
subject and observer, a thinking mind attempting to observe its own
thought without influencing it. Rivers made dynamometer experiments on cocaine similar to those that Freud had conducted, including
himself in the trial and generating similar results. He was unable to
demonstrate whether the decrease in fatigue that the drug produced
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LOST AND FOUND
was ‘due to its action on the sensory side of the nervous mechanism
involved’, as Freud had theorised, or simply ‘due to the direct action of
the cocaine on the muscle’, as other researchers had argued.
15
Unlike Freud, Rivers wrote up his findings exclusively in the third
person, relying on passive constructions that disguised his own involvement: his experiments with tobacco, for example, record that ‘the smoking
was distinctly pleasant, and there was naturally strong sensory stimulation’.16 He soon moved away from experimental work: on the outbreak of
the Great War he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps and was assigned
to the work for which he is best remembered, treating the shell shock of
Siegfried Sassoon and others at Craiglockhart Hospital in Scotland. But
his work on fatigue continued to be widely cited and, along with
Kraepelin’s, set a benchmark for the quantitative, data-driven psychopharmacology that would dominate the field in the twentieth century.
The retreat from subjectivity was hastened and consolidated by
the new doctrine of behaviourism, developed at this time by John B.
Watson in his department of psychology at Johns Hopkins University.
Watson had a profound personal distaste for the introspective method:
as he wrote later, ‘I hated to serve as a subject . . . I was always uncomfortable and acted unnaturally.’17 He found it impossible to align his
private responses with those of his colleagues, and gravitated as quickly
as possible towards experiments on his well-tended colony of white
laboratory rats. In 1913 he published a manifesto for his new approach,
‘Psychology as the Behaviourist Views It’, in which he redefined the
discipline as ‘a purely objective natural science’:
Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behaviour.
Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the
scientific value of its data dependent on the readiness with which
they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness.
18
Watson rejected the entire notion of consciousness, which he saw as
a hangover from the religious past. ‘All that Wundt and his students
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really accomplished’, he wrote, ‘was to substitute for the word “soul”
the word “consciousness”’; but by assuming that ‘there is such a thing
as consciousness and we can analyse it thoroughly by introspection . . .
we find as many analyses as there are individual psychologists’.19 As
behaviourism took hold, self-experiment was driven to the margins.
Once the states of consciousness that drugs generated were deemed
irrelevant, objective data on their behavioural effects could be sourced
equally well from lab rats. The arrival of new instrumentation such as
the electroencephalogram (EEG), first used on humans in 1924,
further accelerated the trajectory away from studying consciousness
and towards measuring brain activity.
Those who persisted with self-experiments became conspicuous
outliers. One such was William McDougall, a colleague of W.H.R.
Rivers who had travelled with him on the 1898 Cambridge University
exhibition to study the psychology of the Torres Strait and New Guinea
islanders. McDougall had subsequently made the same transit into
experimental psychology, becoming in 1901 a co-founder of the British
Psychological Society. In a series of high-profile public debates he
defined his position against Watson, whose theory he dubbed ‘mechanism’, as it treated human beings like machines. McDougall claimed
the mantle of the true behaviourist, one who recognised that mental
events were relevant to behaviour, which could not be understood
without concepts such as desire, striving, valuing or hoping. In 1905
he began experiments to measure fatigue, using a technique later
adopted by Rivers in which trial subjects were asked to hit a succession
of dots that passed in front of them. When the speed of the moving
dots was increased to the subject’s maximal rate, fatigue set in quickly
and the impact of drugs could be precisely measured.
Like Rivers, McDougall was enlisted during the Great War to treat
shell shock victims, after which he teamed up with May Smith, a
former student and one of the first female psychologists, for a series of
studies funded by the Medical Research Council into the effects of
sleep deprivation and drugs on mental functioning. Smith was a gifted
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LOST AND FOUND
researcher, both in laboratory work and in interviewing volunteer
subjects, and she earned a reputation for becoming rapidly expert in
the skills and trades of the subjects she was studying. Despite being
teetotal, she joined McDougall in self-experiments with alcohol, tea,
opium and strychnine, alongside control doses of placebos.
This was remarkable enough for the New York Times to run an
article under the banner headline, ‘Scientists Try Drugs on Themselves’,
reporting that ‘More than 100 remarkable drug tests have been undertaken by a woman scientist, Miss May Smith’.20 ‘Scientists Try Drugs
on Themselves’ was a story that could have been accurately filed on any
day in the previous two centuries; it was an irony of the Progressive Era
that the belated arrival of a self-experimenting female scientist co incided
with the disappearance of the practice, at least from public view.
* * *
In 1900 Jean Lorrain, the monstre sacré of decadent Paris, left the city
for Nice, where he lived out his final six years as an invalid, a regular
patient at the health spas of the Riviera for his tuberculosis, neurasthenia and ether dependency. In 1896 he had been the highest-paid
writer in the city, but the arrival of the twentieth century saw his popularity decline; he was harried by lawsuits for libel and defamation,
writing furiously but erratically for a public that had moved on. He
had often framed his decadence as a hymn to the exhausted final decade
of the nineteenth century, a prelude to the terminal and merciful death
of civilisation. Just before his death Lorrain met one of his few
remaining admirers, the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, who had
traded his life as a decadent poet for one of heroic and frenetic action:
turning his ripe, sensual literary style to hymns in praise of war and
bloodshed, and trading his Romantic individualism for political alliances with the Futurists and Mussolini. In his new incarnation as a
propagandist for Italian nationalism and fearless flying ace, D’Annunzio
embraced the new century, the power of industry, the speed of the
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automobile and the sublime thrill of air travel. Its defining art was the
cinema, with its madcap action, jump cuts and perspective shifts; and
the drug for D’Annunzio’s new incarnation was cocaine, in large quantities, on which he became chronically dependent.
Lorrain left Paris just as the 1900 Exposition Universelle opened,
a dazzling showcase of the new century’s marvels. Over six months,
50 million visitors had their first glimpses of escalators and moving
sidewalks, sound recorders and talking films, planetariums and ocean
ship simulators, all presided over by the world’s largest Ferris wheel
that carried 1,600 passengers at a time. Palaces of Electricity, Optics,
Industry, Machines and Agriculture presented spectacular visions of
the coming century in the elegant, sweeping styles of Art Nouveau,
Belle Epoque, Beaux-Arts and the Vienna Secession. Lorrain’s bohemian Paris was being overwritten with the future glimpsed with disdain
by Baudelaire: a mass culture of spectacle and sensation, the crowd and
the consumer.
Yet Baudelaire’s equation of the modern with individual selffashioning was now itself becoming a thing of the past. If the nineteenth
had been the century of the individual, the twentieth was to be that of
the collective: group identity, solidarity and mass movements. Baudelaire’s
legacy became heavily shadowed by the drugs with which he had dabbled.
In his memoir of his friend, Théophile Gautier had dismissed the idea
that Baudelaire had been ruined by the drugs he wrote about – ‘his illness
was caused by nothing but fatigue, ennui, sorrow, embarrassments’21 –
but a newspaper retrospective in 1902 added to Gautier’s words nonetheless: ‘The end of the poet was sad: the fatigues, the troubles, the sorrows,
the frequent use of those artificial paradises, opium and hashish, quickened his fall.’22 The 1900s were hailed as an era of renewal and regeneration after the degeneration and decadence of the ‘yellow nineties’. As
W.B. Yeats ruefully observed: ‘In 1900 everybody got down off his stilts;
henceforth nobody drank absinthe with his black coffee; nobody went
mad; nobody committed suicide; nobody joined the Catholic church; or
if they did I have forgotten.’
23
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Drug users, in the new climate, were hyper-individualists, but they
also became a scientifically defined cohort. Emil Kraepelin’s experiments with alcohol, together with his personal abstinence, led him to
develop the category of ‘drinker’ as a pathological ‘type’, statistically
at greater risk of mental ill-health and early death.24 The pejorative
associations of ‘drugs’ obscured the distinctions between different
substances, and between occasional and dependent users. Drugs were,
in the words of Clifford Allbutt, president of the British Medical
Association, ushering in a coming plague of neurotics and neurasthenics ‘who scent intoxicants from afar with a retriever-like instinct,
and curious in their sensations, play in and out with all kinds of them’.25
As drug research moved away from subjective descriptions, it became
more tightly focused on addiction and its mental pathology. The more
drugs were defined in terms of risk, harm and danger, the harder it
became to recognise the experiences they generated as a positive contribution to science, philosophy or creativity.
As drug use was pathologised, the popular image of the drug user
moved sharply downmarket. Abstinence became a signifier of healthconsciousness and social status. In the wake of the 1906 Pure Food and
Drug Act, the backlash against industrial food and drug production
increased demand for ethical and natural products, and there was a
boom in spas and sanatoriums that promised to purge the toxins of
everyday life from their patients. In the largest and most renowned, at
Battle Creek in Michigan, the medical superintendent John Harvey
Kellogg’s corn flakes were the signature product of a dietetic system
that excluded meat and processed foods along with all drugs including
alcohol. Patent medicines were seen as toxic substitutes for the natural
therapeutics of fresh air, exercise, electrotherapy and a healthy diet, and
any patients who had recourse to narcotic or stimulant drugs were put
on strict abstinence regimes.
Since drugs diminished reason and exalted instinct, it followed that
their appeal was most dangerous to those whose self-control was
weakest: the mentally unfit and the criminal classes. The US physician
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and addiction specialist T.D. Crothers, one of the first to warn of the
medical dangers of cocaine and morphine in the 1880s, now conceived
cocainism as a problem of ‘the vindictive criminal in lower circles’ who
‘will stoop to any crime, or any act that promises relief . . . who fights
the officer seeking his arrest, who suddenly assaults people on the street
or shoots people without any provocation, or sets fire to buildings,
commits serious damages, acts wildly and maniacally’.26 During the
nineteenth century, the narcotic or stimulant ‘habitué’ was commonly
stereotyped as a member of the professional or leisured classes: a
neurasthenic brain-worker, a dissolute gentleman-about-town or a
depressive and socially isolated widow. By the twentieth, these stereotypes had been supplanted by adolescent gang members, petty criminals and, most sharply of all, members of ethnic minorities.
‘The problem of the twentieth century’, W.E.B. Du Bois observed
in 1903, ‘is the problem of the color-line’, a line that was drawn
nowhere more swiftly and firmly than in attitudes to drug-taking.27
The liberal individualism of John Stuart Mill had always, in practice,
been contingent on status, class and race. A drug user of colour, such
as Paschal Beverly Randolph, was taking on far greater reputational
risks in advocating the use of hashish than, for example, a distinguished
medical figure such as Jacques-Joseph Moreau. But the consequences
were, in the terms proposed by John Stuart Mill, determined by social
mechanisms: Randolph was well aware that his colour made him a
target for prejudice, but his use of hashish was not treated as pathological or criminal. In this respect the Progressive Era belied its name,
hardening and extending the informal racial discrimination that it
inherited.
In the US the most conspicuous example was cocaine. By 1906 it
was well advanced on its transit from miracle drug to social menace,
and its removal from pharmacy shelves by the Pure Food and Drug Act
created an unregulated market for cocaine powder sold on the street in
small packets known as ‘five-cent sniffs’. This trade was common in the
docks, slums and high-crime districts of many US cities, but it quickly
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became identified with the Black population of the southern states: in
1905 the New York Times defined the problem under the headline,
‘Negro Cocaine Evil’.28 Some medical authorities argued that cocaine
had a more destructive effect on Black subjects, leading to hallucinations, paranoia and violent impulses, and even that it made them
impervious to police bullets. These were the years of Jim Crow, the
violent efforts of the white supremacist Southern Redemptionists to
roll back the gains of Reconstruction and to suppress the Black vote
through literacy tests and poll taxes. Black lynchings reached their grim
peak, averaging over a hundred a year in the decade 1891 to 1901. The
Progressive Era’s ethos of local action and self-empowerment was mobilised by white communities to extend states’ rights and allow greater
freedom to police forces who cited the dangers of cocaine as grounds
for intensifying their control of Black communities. Cocaine dependence was commonly described as ‘slavery’, a term that positioned antidrug campaigners and segregationists as the new abolitionists.
29
* * *
The twentieth century’s march of mass production, mass culture
and mass politics was resisted by a vigorous counterculture of individualism and cultivation of the inner self. In 1904 the sociologist Max
Weber began writing The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,
in which he argued that the rational pursuit of economic gain left a
residue of ‘disenchantment’: a world haunted by the loss of the sacred,
in which the individual was confined in an ‘iron cage’ constructed
by the demands of capital, industry and bureaucracy. As traditional
religion retreated, spiritual movements such as New Thought
flourished, in which Taoist, Vedic and Buddhist traditions combined
with the self-reliant precepts of Emerson and the Transcendentalists
and the expansive possibilities of Darwinian evolution to cultivate an
inner connection to the divine, the universal mind or the ‘infinite
intelligence’.
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The conviction that human consciousness was expanding or evolving
was not limited to Theosophists. In 1901 the Canadian psychiatrist
Richard Bucke published his influential Cosmic Consciousness, in which
he argued that ‘higher’ or mystical consciousness was becoming more
widespread. In 1903 F.H.W. Myers proposed that the subliminal self
might include ‘ultra-intellectual’ or ‘supernormal’ faculties that a future
humanity could learn to harness. In 1909 C.H. Judd, president of the
American Psychological Association, used his annual address to oppose
the tide of biological materialism by discussing the evolution of
consciousness. Judd argued that recent leaps of progress across the arts,
science and industry transcended biology, and ‘there is no problem of
present-day science of more vital importance to the psychologist’ than
understanding the higher consciousness that had produced them.30 In
1913 the New York socialite and devotee of New Thought, Mabel
Dodge, wrote: ‘Nearly every thinking person these days is in revolt
against something, because the craving of the individual is for further
consciousness, and because consciousness is expanding and bursting
through the molds that have held it up to now.’
31
For this vanguard of the modern mind, however, drugs played no
part in the quest for higher consciousness. Like alcohol, they were
another padlock on the door of Weber’s iron cage. In 1914 Dodge
convened an impromptu peyote ritual in her Greenwich Village apartment that went disastrously wrong and threatened scandal; she was
horrified that it might be reported as a ‘“Dope Party”. Horrors! I had
heard of such gatherings and they were the antithesis of all I wished to
stand for.’32 Three years later she moved from New York to Taos, where
she immersed herself in the spiritual traditions of the Pueblo Indians
while campaigning for decades against their use of peyote in their ceremonies. In 1936, when their right to do so was confirmed under the
guidelines of the Indian New Deal, she wrote to Harold Ickes, President
Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior: ‘Would you stand for hashish,
cocaine, or morphine and defend them on the grounds of religious
liberty?’33 ‘Drugs’, for the spiritually evolved, were chemical agents of
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control, pumped out by big business to induce a state of mass hypnosis
and disconnection from the natural and spiritual world.
Mabel Dodge’s guests at her Taos retreat included Aldous Huxley, who
provided the defining literary portrayal of this view in his dystopian parable
Brave New World (1932). Peyote, in the novel, is confined to the ‘savages’
on the New Mexico reservations; in the civilised society of the future the
old intoxicants have been supplanted by the all-purpose palliative soma.
Alongside other escapist technologies, soma has resolved the problems of
industrialised mass culture by creating a hyper-mediated fantasy world that
wards off the risk of social unrest. Happily distracted, the lower castes of the
population toil in factories: ‘seven and a half hours of mild, unexhausting
labour, and then the soma ration and games and unrestricted copulation
and the feelies. What more can they ask for?’34 Soma was the sacrament of
a political ideology – Huxley had Henry Ford, George Bernard Shaw and
the Fabian Society in mind – in which a world state keeps its population in
check with a mass culture that allows transcendence only by subsuming
individuality. The drug is consumed in ritualised circles, with hymns in
praise of Ford and the toast ‘I drink to the Greater Being’.
35
In comparison with his later psychedelic writings, Huxley is curiously vague about the state of consciousness that soma produces.
It is described variously and at different doses as a euphoric, an antidepressant, a pain reliever and a hallucinogen, but there is virtually no
subjective description of the experience it produces. One character, we
are told, feels ‘a calm ecstasy of achieved consummation . . . she was
full, she was made perfect, she was still more than merely herself’: satisfaction without achievement, sensation without content, pleasure
without a cause.36 In the drug fictions of the nineteenth century, the
narrative often unfolded in the heightened inner world of its mentally
altered protagonist; soma, by contrast, is ‘drugs’ through the lens of
behaviourism, a chemically induced form of social control that manifests only a blank, delusory euphoria.
37
Those who advertised their use of drugs in in the Progressive Era did so
as an act of ostentatious transgression. The most prominent was the poet,
260