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- Herausgeber: The Robson Press
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
That airy disclaimer, uttered by Tallulah Bankhead, has long been an article of faith for coke's legion of fans - and little has changed since cocaine's sensational debut in the Belle Epoque. Alternately glorified and demonised, hailed as a miraculous cure-all or blamed for society's failings, the White Lady has gone global. Today, she is the stimulant of choice for European partiers and stressed-out bankers alike - and everyone from producer to consumer is playing a high-stakes game. In Coke, Natalia Naish and Jeremy Scott recount the sweeping history of cocaine since its first appearance, charting the highs and lows from pre-history to the present day. With personality led stories of its more notorious users, including Sigmund Freud, Stevie Nicks, Kate Moss and Amy Winehouse, the tale is rich in anecdote, often tragic and sometimes hilarious. Neither moralistic nor condoning, Coke: The Biography is a thrilling popular history of a global phenomenon.
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That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
‘Kubla Khan’, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1797
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
HANS RAUSING (1963–) PART I
It was only urgent need for cash that got Hans Rausing out of bed that afternoon. He and his wife had been using heavily since the night before, Eva particularly so. They were almost out of gear.
Hans needed a hit to get himself together. Taking up the pipe, the bowl covered with perforated foil, he set it to his lips. With his right hand he snapped on the lighter and directed its jet of flame on the small rock of crack cocaine balanced on the silver paper. He inhaled deeply, drawing the sweet vapour into his lungs.
Within seconds his heartbeat soared, his head cleared and delusive vigour together with a ghost of will returned to him. This gave him the strength to pass the pipe to Eva, swing his legs to the floor and stand up. He started for the bathroom, picking his way through a litter of discarded syringes, charred scraps of foil and bloodied tissues. The two rooms the couple lived in had not been cleaned for months and the place looked like a squat.
The bedroom, with fetid air trapped within shut windows and curtains that remained drawn all day to exclude the sun, gave off the characteristic reek of the worst kind of crack den; the smell of unwashed bodies, stale tobacco and soiled sheets.
What was incongruous about this particular crack den was its location. The Rausings’ six-storey house in Cadogan Place was worth £70 million and their fortune was estimated at £4 billion. This was serious money, even in London’s Belgravia, which is colonised by Russian oligarchs, Arab princes and the cream of international non-doms. Many of them may be dodgy, but they are all part of the global super-rich.
Leaving the bathroom door ajar, Hans went to the mirror to shave. Stubble darkened his jaw and cheeks in a face that had grown gaunt and cadaverous. Neither of them had eaten for some time. He could have called the Filipino staff who left them meals on a tray at the foot of the stairs – the servants were banned from ascending onto the second floor. But neither Hans nor Eva had any appetite.
Lathering his face, Hans started to shave with a shaky hand. His concentration was focused. The hit he’d taken would last no longer than ten minutes, enough to clean up and get dressed. He’d need another in order to leave the house, get to the cash machine in Sloane Square 250 yards away and make it home. Then he’d call the Man…
He’d completed one side of his face, whose flesh had been denied sunlight for so long that it showed pallid white below lank unwashed hair. He looked like a vagrant. As he put the razor to the other cheek, the sound of a thump came from the room behind him.
I heard Eva slide off the bed. I went to the bedroom and saw her sitting on the floor. She was leaning sideways and her face was resting on a pillow. I heard her exhale and then she did not move at all. I saw her alive for just a few seconds. I went to her and grabbed her and tried to pull her up. I remember shouting, ‘Eva, Eva, Eva’ and turned her toward me and saw her eyes had dimmed. She had stopped breathing before I reached her. I knew she was dead…
She was still clutching the crack pipe in her hand.
Months later Hans would say he had no memory of what happened next but ‘with the benefit of hindsight I think I did not act rationally. I sat with her for a period of time then covered her up with a blanket and duvet.’ He had difficulty detaching the pipe from her clenched fingers because her grip was so tight. ‘I couldn’t look at her. I could not cope with her dying and do not feel able to cope with the reality of her death…’
Earlier that year Eva had gone to rehab in California – the last of countless similar attempts – and checked out early to come home to him. She had been absent only for a few days but he’d struggled to get by without her support. They were unable to communicate or relate to others and had severed their social connection with the world – and quite a privileged one it had been. Their circle included the Prince of Wales and Camilla. Hans and Eva were alone in the dependency they shared.
He had to protect her, Hans reasoned with a cracked and faulty brain. What followed took time, and more than once he had need of a hit to continue. He went to the large linen cupboard on the landing by their bedroom. Raking out the contents of the bottom shelf, he created a snug and private space. He wrapped her body in as many duvets as he could find and rolled the bundle onto the shelf. He locked the door.
It wasn’t until the fourth day that he noticed the smell leaking from the closet. He found a can of deodoriser and sprayed the bundle till it was soaked and relocked the door. It was warm in the linen cupboard and three days later the smell of putrescence was back.
In the kitchen Hans found another can of air freshener and a roll of tape. He opened the closet and dragged out the bundle, wrapped it in plastic bin bags and secured it with string. His actions were methodical, deliberate and performed with an underwater slowness. He was not smoking crack now but mainlining heroin, which dulled the anguish and dread that was always present.
He manoeuvred the unwieldy package back into the closet. Locking the door, he sealed its edges with gaffer tape. Returning to the bedroom he knotted a tie around his upper arm, took up a syringe, probed for a main vein, shot up some smack and resumed his vigil…
1
AND GOD CREATED COKE
THE TREE OF LIFE
It’s a nondescript rangy-looking plant with small white flowers and nothing distinctive about it except its insatiable urge to grow and flourish. When cultivated and pruned, its abundant leaves can be harvested four times a year.
The Tree of Life – that is how the coca bush was named and venerated in pre-Columbian South America. Viewed from where we stand today, the label appears spurious, even fatally misleading.
In the sixteenth century, Spanish explorers noted the indigenous peoples’ habit of chewing coca leaves. To this day, the custom has not changed, and the modern coquero still stores the leaves in a wad in his cheek. The wad is then poked with a stick he has dipped into the iscupuru, a bag containing burnt roots, smashed seashells, lime or ash to release the alkaloids in the coca and produce a subtle high.
At first the coquero’s saliva turns green and his cheeks go numb. Then he begins to feel its effects: he is no longer hungry, though his stomach is empty. Strength, energy and optimism return to him. The lack of oxygen in the high Andes and the harshness of his life become more bearable.
Coca can be chewed or brewed and drunk as a tea. It does not appear to be either addictive or harmful and is used to cure altitude sickness or supplement an inadequate diet with essential nutrients and vitamins. Were it not for one aspect, the coca plant might be thought of as little more than a mild stimulant comparable to chocolate or coffee. But the leaf’s 1 per cent cocaine content changes everything and has transformed it into one of the most expensive and controversial commodities in the world.
CREATION MYTHS
Coca has been venerated by South Americans for thousands, if not tens of thousands of years. Coca found in burial sites from 3000 BC and ancient clay figures with bulging cheeks attest to the constancy of the habit. The word coca is derived from Amyara, a pre-Incan language. The Incas built upon creation myths of earlier cultures to develop a rich folklore of death and regeneration centring on coca. In one legend, a coca plant springs out of the grave of a woman who has been dismembered for her rampant promiscuity. Another tale features the universal tropes of flood and regeneration with an added twist. The god Khuno punishes the Altiplano Indians by unleashing a storm which destroys their jungle homeland. Amidst the wreckage there is a single coca plant, and after consuming it, they find the strength to rebuild their lives.
Coca played both a spiritual and practical role in maintaining the Inca Empire, which, at its height (c. 1438–1533), spanned 75 per cent of the west coast of South America. Paved roads allowed for rapid communication by relay messengers, who used coca to sustain them on their long-distance runs. Without a writing system, quipus or knotted strings made of llama hair were used to record events. They were deciphered by coca-chewing sages.
Because of coca’s anaesthetising properties it was administered to those about to be sacrificed or trepanned. The divine plant was usually restricted to royal personages, court orators and priests, who offered it to the gods and conjured spirits with it during religious ceremonies. One wonders if their compulsory congregation, denied access to the cup, experienced quite the same exalted visions.
A DISGUSTING HABIT
Early in the conquest of the New World, Spanish explorers looked on the phenomenon of coca chewing with bemusement or revulsion. In 1504 Amerigo Vespucci notes: ‘They all had their cheeks swollen out with a green herb inside, which they were constantly chewing like beasts, so they could scarcely utter speech, we were unable to comprehend their secret, nor with what object they acted thus.’ By the time Pizarro finished off the Inca Empire in the late 1530s with the help of European weaponry and diseases, he and his cohorts hoped the plant might generate income as a cash crop. The Europeans did not take to it.
The problem was not the product’s quality but its image. Mastication was unaesthetic and uncivilised. How could you look decent or even speak properly with a wad of coca in your cheek? Besides, they dismissed its supposed qualities as primitive hallucinations.
Without obvious monetary reward to be gained from coca, the Catholic Church, bent on stamping out any vestigial barbarism amongst the natives, anathematised it: ‘The plant is idolatry and the work of the Devil, and appears to give strength only by a deception of the Evil One.’ The matter was brought up at the First and Second Councils of Lima in 1552 and 1569. In a span of only four years, Don Francisco de Toledo, Viceroy of Peru, issued seventy ordinances against it. But coca was never actually banned, because the Indians, who were relied upon for the essential task of unearthing silver to ship back to Spain, absolutely refused to work without it. As usual, economics trumped religious scruples.
Coca was grudgingly condoned because it helped the Indians (who requested coca instead of payment because they distrusted European currency) to endure the toxic conditions in the mines. De Toledo introduced a labour tax or mita, which required all men to work in the mines for up to four months of the year and was, in effect, a form of slavery. Tens of thousands of Indians died from exhaustion and poisoning, receiving nothing but coca leaves in recompense.
DISCOVERY
Unlike other New World crops such as tobacco and cacao, coca was essentially ignored by Europeans until the eighteenth century. There are a few early references to it, including the 1662 poem ‘A Legend of Coca’ by Abraham Cowley, and a detailed description of the plant by a doctor from Seville. In 1735, the French botanist Joseph de Jussieu brought some leaves back to the Museum of Natural History where they were examined by the scientist Carl Linnaeus. The Erythroxylumcoca species was belatedly classified in 1786.
On his 1801 expedition to Peru, the explorer Alexander von Humboldt expressed an interest in coca but mistakenly attributed its uplifting effects to the lime the Indians kept in their iscupuru. Another German determined ‘that the moderate use of coca is not merely innocuous, but that it may be very conducive to the health’. Others violently disagreed with him and, from early on, public opinion on coca and then cocaine was divided.
In the 1800s, scientists began isolating nitrogen-based compounds in plants, known as alkaloids, which seemed to hold endless medical and commercial possibilities. Morphine was extracted from opium in 1803, quinine and caffeine were isolated in 1829 and nicotine in 1833. It was only a matter of time before cocaine was isolated from coca.
The main impediment to the research was meagre supplies of healthy leaves because they travelled badly. In 1857, chemist Friedrich Wöhler asked scientist Carl Scherzer who was travelling on Franz Josef’s ship Novara, to collect as many coca leaves as possible on his journey to South America. When Scherzer returned in 1859 with 14 kilos, work could begin. Wöhler assigned the project to his brilliant PhD student, Albert Niemann, who took two years to isolate the coca alkaloid successfully. The 26-year-old published his seminal dissertation, On a New Organic Base in the Coca Leaves, in 1860 but died shortly after handing it in. Wilhelm Lossen took over the project, arriving at cocaine’s chemical formula in 1863.
Niemann’s steps for producing cocaine were relatively straightforward. First he soaked the leaves in a solution of alcohol and sulphuric acid. After draining the liquid, he was left with a sticky substance to which he added bicarbonate of soda. He then distilled the mixture with ether and was left with a pile of white crystals. Niemann followed the same nomenclature of nicotine, morphine and other alkaloids by naming his product coca-ine or cocaine. And so was born the drug of our title.
WHAT IS IT?
Cocaine (C17H21NO4) is a crystalline alkaloid. In its hard salt form (hydrochloride), it is ground into powder, mixed with other substances and usually snorted (it can also be consumed orally, vaginally etc.) or dissolved in water and injected. Cocaine hydrochloride cannot be smoked because its melting point is too high. Crack cocaine, which is yellowish to brown rather than white, is the base form of powdered cocaine. It is not water soluble and can be smoked because it vaporises at 90 degrees rather than 190 degrees.
Cocaine is a central nervous stimulant that, like coffee, is an appetite suppressant. It also acts as a local anaesthetic. It constricts the blood vessels and increases body temperature, blood pressure and heart rate. Its effects are subtle rather than overpowering which is why it took doctors some time to cotton on to the fact that it can be harmful and addictive – both physically and psychologically.
Unlike heroin, which is rarely taken casually, some people are able to use cocaine recreationally without it negatively impacting their lives. Others become hopelessly hooked. Excessive use can lead to heart attacks and various health problems. Cocaine deaths are rare – unless combined with heroin as a speedball – but not impossible.
A cocaine high doesn’t last very long – about thirty minutes for powder and even less for crack. The reason it makes users feel good is because it blocks the re-uptake function of several neurotransmitters including dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine. Instead of being reabsorbed, they accumulate in the nerve synapses and flood the user with feelings of energy and well-being. Dopamine is the chemical that is most associated with the body’s reward system and is released when we eat, have sex or take drugs. With extended cocaine use, the dopamine receptors are killed off and it takes stronger and stronger doses to work.
AN EARLY FAN
Paolo Mantegazza was an Italian doctor who became entranced with the coca leaf shortly before Niemann synthesised cocaine. After experimenting on himself in 1859, he penned a rapturous paean to coca:
God is unjust because he made man incapable of sustaining the effects of coca lifelong. I prefer a life of ten years with coca to one of a hundred thousand without it. It seemed to me that I was separated from the whole world, and I beheld the strangest images, most beautiful in colour and in form, that can be imagined.
Mantagazza was amongst the first to believe that coca could be used as a panacea for all ills.
THE COMING-OUT BALL
1860 marks the debut of cocaine. This was the date that the Dama Blanca stepped onto the world stage, and the start of her intimate biography.
Early in that decade, Merck of Darmstadt began manufacturing a token amount of cocaine, about 50 grams per year, just enough to establish their marketing right. Today, the news of a new wonder-drug is relayed instantly to the world. But during the nineteenth century information dispersed slowly, and it took time for cocaine to become a pharmaceutical blockbuster.
During the 1870s, doctors around the world began exploring the potential uses of coca and cocaine – many failing to distinguish between leaf and powder. A Scottish physician called Robert Christison tested cocaine’s effects on starving hikers and a Canadian doctor gave coca leaves to a lacrosse team prior to a game. Both concluded that cocaine and coca could be used as energy boosters. A French doctor saw cocaine as a cure for throat infections. A German physician surreptitiously slipped cocaine into Bavarian soldiers’ drinking water, determining that the drug made them more alert and vigorous.
Articles on cocaine began appearing in medical publications in the 1870s. In 1874, Dr Alexander Bennett wrote a piece in the British Medical Journal identifying cocaine as a mild stimulant that could be poisonous in strong doses. Another article in the British Medical Journal examined coca leaves as a performance enhancer. This was put to the test in 1876 when American race-walker Edward Weston chomped on coca during a 115-mile, 24-hour race, to the fury of his British competitors, who accused him of having an unfair advantage. He has the dubious distinction of being the first man to introduce drugs to the Western sporting tradition.
PROFILE: ANGELO MARIANI (1838–1914)
Angelo Mariani was born in Corsica into a family of doctors and chemists and was apprenticed to the latter profession at an early age. There was little by way of entertainment in Corsica for the imaginative boy so he read a lot. From travellers’ tales he learned of a plant, coca, that grew in South America and seemed to possess magical qualities. His interest in coca turned into an obsession.
Funded by his parents, Mariani moved to Paris, took rooms, and read all the information available on coca. With difficulty and at considerable expense, he obtained samples of the leaf picked at varying altitudes all over South America. He differentiated them by aroma – as with true experts in wine, he had an unusually sensitive nose.
Choosing the best examples of leaf, he steeped them in good claret. The wine leached the alkaloids from the leaves and, when filtered from the resulting sludge, disguised the inherent bitterness of coca. The clear appetising liquid contained very little cocaine, but cocaine and alcohol combine in the liver to form a potent compound: cocaethylene.
In 1863 he brought out Vin Mariani and knew he had a winner. It tasted like the finest wine but with an added kick that kept you sharp and provided a boost. The ingredients were entirely legal but only Mariani knew the secret process by which they were combined. Without protecting his wine by patenting it, he cornered the market due to his prescient use of advertising.
Mariani’s marketing campaign was global in scale. He persuaded a couple of local doctors to sample it and give him his first quotes. He then despatched cases to a wide and eclectic range of well-known personalities. His accompanying letter on expensive stationery expressed his esteem and good will, suggesting that his Excellency might find a glass beneficial and bracing amidst his many duties, and requested a signed photograph for his humble admirer Mariani.
He had invented not only a unique product but the personalised celebrity endorsement. Almost everyone he wrote to replied enthusiastically, most likely while the wine’s effects were still with them. The list includes Anatole Dumas, Jules Verne, Zola, Ibsen, the Lumière brothers, President McKinley, Ulysses S. Grant (it helped him finish his Civil War memoirs), Thomas Edison, Rodin and the Czar of Russia. Louis Blériot wrote that he’d nipped on the wine while first flying the Channel; Auguste Bartholdi, who had just completed building the Statue of Liberty, said had he known about the tonic ‘it would have attained a height of several hundred metres’. And Pope Leo XIII was so uplifted by the product he sent its inventor a papal gold medal.
Vin Mariani proved an immediate international success and sold briskly not just in France and other European countries but in the US. Meanwhile, Mariani published the signed portrait endorsements in newspapers as fold-in supplements. He had them exquisitely presented and published in thirteen volumes. He gave one set to Queen Victoria, who was delighted to receive his books and said she valued them ‘among the finest volumes in her collection’.
Mariani, the chemist/inventor and advertising pioneer, became a millionaire. Others were quick to follow and by the 1890s there were nineteen rival coca wines on the market. It became the staple fillip of the Belle Epoque.
TRANSPORTATION
Coca was an ace product, but shipping the leaves to the US and Europe was a nightmare. Consignments tended to rot to stinking compost en route. It would clearly be preferable to ship pure cocaine rather than coca leaves in bulk. In 1885, a chemist, Henry Hurd Rusby, visited Bolivia and, after first setting fire to his lab, formalised the method for doing so. Based on Niemann’s process, Rusby created a transportable coca paste, known as pasta básica (basic paste) which is still smoked by the locals.
Rusby’s coca paste put an end to the problem of shipping and by 1906 dozens of South American cocaine factories, particularly in Peru, were churning out crude cocaine. Germans chemists improved the process, doubling the strength of the product. The net result of this was that cocaine became cheap and readily available in the US and Europe. In Germany the price dropped to about 1 mark per gram. The stimulating product sold briskly but growing demand could not keep up with supply. There would soon be a glut of cocaine.
THE BOOM
By the late nineteenth century as many as 2,500 patent remedies, cures and tonics were on offer in America. The market for patent medicines was immense and virtually unregulated and it was in this environment that the new wonder-drug, cocaine, took off and flourished.
Cocaine was available over the counter, either in pure form or water-based solutions. It was welcomed as a treatment for asthma, alcoholism, the common cold, whooping cough, dysentery, haemorrhoids, neuralgia, seasickness, sore nipples, vaginismus, syphilis, as well as for morphine and opium addiction. It was also seen as a means to prevent female masturbation, since it numbed the clitoris. Herman Knapp, a German-American ophthalmologist who wrote a book called Cocaine and its use in Opthalmic and General Surgery, injected cocaine into his penis with predictably chilling results.
Two pharmaceutical companies, Merck of Germany and Parke-Davis in the US, cornered the cocaine market. Merck was particularly dominant and Germany would serve as the main global supplier of cocaine until the First World War. Parke-Davis used innovative marketing techniques, selling a bespoke kit with a syringe for self-injecting. They funded the Therapeutic Gazette, a medical journal devoted to extolling cocaine’s benefits, and published a handbook on the drug, which was endorsed by the American Hay Fever Prevention Association. In the course of a single year the New York Medical Journal alone published twenty-seven articles on cocaine, all of them positive.
PROFILE: SI GMUND FREUD (1856–1939)
Even if a literal interpretation of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories is no longer applicable, there is no doubt that his ideas revolutionised the humanities and changed the way that we approach the human psyche. Most importantly for cultural modernism, Freud developed a theory of the fragmented rather than unitary self – comprising the superego, ego and id – and the subconscious. Turning his back on the Enlightenment’s faith in reason and progress, he argued that civilisation is founded on desire – or at least the interplay between sexuality and repression – and that darker drives are always lurking beneath the surface.
Freud’s reputation fluctuates between hagiography and demonisation, along with many caricatures in popular culture of the austere, bearded pundit in a three-piece suit and spectacles grasping a cigar while going on about sex. What often escapes note is the fact that, for twelve years (1884–96), and possibly longer, he was addicted to cocaine.
Freud’s parents arrived in Vienna from the Ukraine as part of a great wave of Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe in the mid-nineteenth century to swell the ghettos of Western cities. Sigmund was the first of eight children and the family struggled to make money in an anti-Semitic environment. In these stringent circumstances, the introverted young man applied himself to study medicine, and was appointed to the General Hospital of Vienna when he was twenty-six.
In 1882 Freud met and quickly proposed to Martha Bernays, the daughter of a middle-class Jewish family living near Hamburg. Because he possessed neither fortune nor immediate prospects, her parents vetoed the match. For the next four years their relationship was epistolary rather than physical.
Freud longed for a financial fix so that he could afford to marry Martha and satisfy his natural impulses. Perhaps the largely unexamined new drug cocaine would be the answer to their problems. ‘I am procuring some myself and will try it with cases of heart disease and also nervous exhaustion … We do not need more than one such lucky hit for us to think of setting up house,’ he wrote to Martha.
Freud’s interest in cocaine was piqued in 1884 after poring over books on the coca plant and journals suggesting a variety of medical uses for cocaine – he was particularly struck by an article in the Therapeutic Gazette which posited that cocaine might be used as a cure for morphine addiction. Despite the expense, he bought some from Merck and used himself as laboratory rat. Once he felt sure that the results were favourable – it seemed to helped with his mood, indigestion and libido – he gave it to his nearest and dearest, including his sisters and Martha, in order to ‘make her strong and give her cheeks some colour’. It was now time to try it on a real addict.
Dr Fleischl-Marxow was a handsome and brilliant young doctor until his career was cut short by an accident. While dissecting a cadaver, he nicked his thumb, which had to be amputated when the wound became infected. The continuing growth of nerve endings caused him to suffer from an unending torture of pain, which he treated with morphine. His self-administered dosage was high and he became addicted.
In May of 1884 Freud contacted Fleischl-Marxow and told his friend and fellow physician that cocaine was a possible cure for his morphine problem. Fleischl-Marxow clung to the news ‘like a drowning man’ and eagerly tried the new medicine. When Freud saw signs of improvement, he reported his findings in a lecture at the Psychiatric Society in Vienna, claiming that cocaine had improved Fleischl-Marxow’s condition without causing habituation.
The contrary was so and by April 1885, Fleischl-Marxow was using over a gram per day, and combining the drug with morphine. Soon he was exhibiting classic symptoms of cocaine poisoning: fainting, insomnia and convulsions, combined with the conviction that insects and snakes were crawling beneath his skin. He spent hours trying to extract them with the point of a needle. Fleischl-Marxow remained dependent on both morphine and cocaine until his death in 1891.
Freud kept a photograph of his tragic friend next to his bed for the rest of his life – perhaps a sign that he felt some remorse about creating one of the first cocaine addicts. In the 1880s, however, he refused to admit to himself or the public that cocaine was anything but beneficial. In the summer of 1884 he wrote Über Coca (On Coca), a long paper on the history of cocaine which included the results of his self-administered tests and expounded upon his theory about cocaine as a cure for morphine addiction. Über Coca was Freud’s first scientific publication and spurred him to write other cocaine-related articles, some of which are penned in a suspiciously frenzied style.
In the winter of 1884 and the spring of 1885 Freud felt positive about his research on cocaine, which had been reported in several reputable journals. His place in the annals of history seemed secure until a colleague, Dr Carl Keller, whom Freud had introduced to the drug, began conducting experiments with cocaine. He found it to be the ideal anaesthetic for operations on the human eye such as the removal of cataracts. Keller published a paper on the subject which gained him international recognition. Freud never quite overcame his resentment and blamed a long holiday with Martha for the fact that he hadn’t made the discovery himself.
Martha was the recipient of many of Freud’s cocaine-induced mood swings and manic missives such as this from June 1884:
Woe to you my little Princess, when I come. I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are forward you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn’t eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body.
In 1885 and 1886, Freud’s cocaine use become more pronounced and his dosages increased. While working with the neurologist Charcot in Paris, he took cocaine to overcome his shyness and make social and professional situations more bearable. He wrote to Martha on the subject:
He [Charcot] invited me to come to his house. You can imagine my apprehension … and satisfaction. White tie and gloves, even a fresh shirt, a careful brushing of my last remaining hair, and so on. A little cocaine to untie my tongue … As you see, I am not doing at all badly.
From 1887 Freud maintained an in-depth correspondence and close relationship with a younger surgeon, Wilhelm Fliess, a nose and throat specialist whose ‘nasal reflex theory’ hypothesised that the nose is a microcosm of the rest of the body and is, therefore, responsible for both mental and physical well-being. He wrote a book entitled The Relationship Between the Nose and the Female Sex Organs.
Freud naturally turned to Fliess when he had problems with his own nose. Excessive cocaine snorting caused blocking in his nasal passage and Fleiss would cauterise the affected areas with a hot metal instrument. Freud complained to Fliess about other symptoms, probably caused by cocaine, such as ‘cardiac misery … violent arrhythmia, constant tension, pressure, burning in the heart region, shooting pains down my left arm…’ Fliess advised more cocaine and told him to give up cigars.
In 1895, Freud still believed that neurotic and psychosomatic symptoms could be alleviated with cocaine. He prescribed the drug to a troubled young woman, Emma Eckstein, who resultantly ‘developed an extensive necrosis of the nasal mucous membrane’ that needed to be treated. Fleiss was brought in to operate on her nose (as well as Freud’s) and inserted a large wad of gauze up a nostril before applying cocaine to her wounds to stop the bleeding. It all went according to plan.
A month after the operation, Freud was called urgently to Eckstein’s bedside. She was in dire distress because it turned out that Fleiss had accidentally left the gauze up her nose, causing an infection. Freud describes the moment of discovery: ‘Before either of us had time to think, at least half a metre of gauze had been removed from the cavity. The next moment came a flow of blood. The patient turned white, her eyes bulged, and she had no pulse…’ Fliess had botched the operation and nearly killed Emma in the process. The Emma Eckstein incident sickened Freud and haunted him for years to come.
Throughout the first half of the 1890s, Freud wrote alternately giddy and anxious letters about his cocaine use, sometimes claiming to feel unbelievably well, other times complaining of nasal swelling and the heavy discharge of yellow pus. He finally came to accept that the drug was both damaging and highly addictive ‘if taken to excess’. He broke off his friendship with Fliess, another heavy user, and, in the autumn of 1896, wrote that ‘the cocaine brush has been completely put aside’. There is, however, evidence that Freud continued taking coke for longer than he was willing to admit.
In later life, Freud was not proud of his relationship with the drug that had betrayed him. As if it were a love match with a deceptive woman, he never referred to that period of his life – indeed did his best to suppress any evidence of his misalliance.
PROFILE: WILLIAM HALSTED (1852–1922)
William Halsted was born in New York in 1852. His father ran a large insurance company. His mother – rich in her own right and somewhat grand – employed staff to raise the boy and packed him off to school as soon as possible.
