Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century

Mike Jay

(Dedalus, £9.99)
Buy it at BOL

As every schoolboy knows, consciousness-altering drugs did not become illegal in this country until the early part of this century. Until then, people had been able to go to the chemist for any number of pick-me-up or put-me-down potions, tonics and powders, containing various concentrations of opium, cocaine, or cannabis. The situation was not even regarded as a problem, except for an unfortunate few.

What this excellent book does is tell us how we got from there to here; and also how we got there in the first place. For the true story of psychotropic substances in the modern world begins on 17 April 1799, as a young Humphry Davy inhaled four quarts of nitrous oxide from a silk bag in order to see what happened to his brain. (He also identifies "the first though by no means the last after-dinner guest to be subjected to an interminable cocaine-fuelled rant".) As Jay puts it: "This emergence of the effects of mind-expanding drugs into the clear light of science was both a cause and an effect of the birth of a new aspect of humanity - one which today we take for granted as part of our modern inheritance, but which in Davy's time was still emerging. To allow drugs into the mind in this way demands modern ideas of human agency, personality and responsibility; it both requires and generates an entirely new language for describing what goes on inside our heads; it holds up a mirror of self-consciousness which strips away the protective cladding of symbol, mystery and belief, leaving us naked in the keen air of the future, our inner workings visible as never before."

That is as purple as Jay's prose gets; but it states with precision as well as poetry the nature of the drug experience, and hints at one of the reasons why (as Nick Davies put it in one of his chilling reports on child abuse last week) we live in a society where police departments around the world are far happier to share resources and cooperate on the matter of the illegal drugs trade than on the kidnap and sexual enslavement of children. For it is not just that drugs were once tolerated and now are not; he traces the history of intolerance and fear surrounding them, showing that reaction to the pharmacopoeia was gradual, confused, and plausible; the most plausible and damaging myth being that we once lived in a society without drugs and could return there if we had the will and the power. We are, as he puts it, in the middle of a "noble experiment" - words used to describe the awful mistake of prohibition - and forget that fashionable ladies used to have ether parties.

Jay tries to be sober, as it were, and treat the historical record judiciously; he certainly gives the impression of being a trustworthy guide. (One test of this is how he treats the theory that Stevenson created Jekyll and Hyde during a cocaine binge. Some writers, in the face of no real evidence, assert it as fact, and it does seem as though it is on the way to being accepted as such; Jay just says that it is "likely". Which might still be going too far for some, but actually represents caution these days.) There is plenty of stuff here that is not news, but plenty that is, too; and if you are not quite familiar with the subject, or, like Jack Straw, brutally ignorant, you really should read this book.