Trechos de The Pursuit Of Oblivion: A Social History Of Drugs (2001), de Richard Davenport-Hines.
Sir Edward Henry, chief of the Metropolitan Police, stated that his force was not aware of a cocaine problem until late in 1915. The London Evening Standard in January 1916 reported cocaine-sniffing among nightclub habitués: In the ladies' cloakroom of a certain establishment two bucketsful of thrown away small circular cardboard boxes were discovered by the cleaners the other day - discarded cocaine boxes. Shortly afterwards two policemen from Liège, who were exiled from Belgium during the German occupation, sent information on cocaine-dealing to Vine Street police station. They drew police attention to a sandwich shop at 89, Shaftesbury Avenue, and gave the names of "Jewish boys" and other men who were selling cocaine to women. The shop, which was accordingly put under surveillance, "was patronised chiefly by prostitutes and Continental undesirables, but we saw nothing to justify Police action", the detective inspector at Vine Street reported. "We interviewed several prostitutes and were astonished at the manner in which this dangerous habit had developed among that class of persons, also amongst soldiers." Detective Inspector Francis Carlin judged that cocaine had "a very dangerous effect upon the brain of any person who indulged in its use" because it "ultimately results in the total loss of will power".
Cocaine's reduction of self-control was part of its attraction for sex workers and their clients. The divisional police surgeon at Vine Street reported in 1916 that most users were prostitutes or Canadian soldiers; the majority were "snuffing it up the nose", but a few took it intravenously. A sergeant from the Canadian Military Police, who worked undercover in Soho during 1916, testified that the chief supply came from chemists' assistants in west central London.
- - -
British hostility to cocaine increased after the declaration of war. Forgetful of the importance of the Dutch in the cocaine business, the British Medical Journal in 1916 noted that "the production of cocaine was almost entirely in German hands" before the hostilities, and that most illicit suppliers were still "foreigners". The Vine Street policeman's remark that drugs sapped will power chimed with the alarm of the military authorities about a vitiated war effort. They became alarmed that the drug traffic could be used to undermine British fighting power and military discipline. "I am told that this evil practice is exceedingly rife at the present time," Sir Francis Lloyd (1853-1926), who was the general in command of the London district, declared of cocaine. "It is doing an immense amount of harm, I am told. They say that it is so ingrained that once you take it ... you will not give it up." His information was that cocaine was being used as "an aphrodisiac". Some prostitutes sold cocaine to 300 or 400 of the 250,000 Canadian soldiers who were passing through Britain on their way to the Western Front. Canadian military pay was five times greater than that of English soldiers, which made them "a natural mark" for prostitutes, as Brent lamented in June 1916. Canadians were "in a state of indignation ... amounting almost to revolt" over the corruption of their young men.
In response to these anxieties an Army Council order of 11 May 1916 decreed that soldiers in Britain would require a medical prescription to obtain barbiturates, benzamines, chloral, coca, cocaine, codeine, diacetylmorphine, Indian hemp, opium, morphine, sulphonal and any preparations or derivatives associated with these drugs. Shortly afterwards the Vine Street policemen secured a conviction against one of the dealers who had been denounced by the Belgian exiles. The police apparently exacerbated alarm by telling journalists that cocaine "is driving hundreds of women mad", which resulted in the Daily Chronicle blaring on 19 July that "the use of cocaine has become in six months a veritable mania, an obsession only too terribly common among the women who haunt the West End at night. Unhappily, too, this vicious craze has spread among soldiers." The same newspaper stated that cocaine was being "sold at a profit of 1,000 per cent". Stories circulated alleging that prostitutes were using cocaine to drug, stupefy and rob their johns. "The drug not only enslaves and ruins the whole constitution of its victim, being far more deadly than either opium or alcohol; but it directly promotes the committing of crime."
- - -
Delevingne's strategy against illicit drugs was strengthened by the imposition of stricter controls on cocaine and opium under Regulation 40B of the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) of 28 July 1916. This regulation was made at the request of the police commissioner, Sir Edward Henry, who had written a week earlier, with exaggeration, that the "evil" of cocaine was "rapidly assuming huge dimensions". Henry's information was largely second-hand: "As far as I can learn from reading it is the most baneful drug known." DORA had been introduced on the outbreak of war in 1914, and its regulations enabled the government to quell or quash anything that might jeopardise the prospects of British victory or assist the enemy. Munitions output was in its clutches; earlier restrictions on the supply of alcohol were intended to keep factory workers sober and productive. Regulation 40B suspended the more complicated minutiae of the Pharmacy Acts regulating the retail trade; the supply of dangerous drugs to troops became a criminal offence as did their possession by a civilian without medical prescription. It prohibited the import of cocaine and opiates except under licence, their possession without authorisation, and their supply by a pharmacist except under medical prescription.
- - -
Drugs were feared as a technique of foreign subversion. During 1917 the English author Beverley Nichols (1898-1983) was sent by the War Office to act as an agent provocateur of pacifists and defeatists at the Café Royal in Regent Street. His effeminacy aroused the hostility of vice policemen, who raided his rooms to search for drugs and question his landlady about male visitors. Devotees of drugs and sodomy both connoted threatening weirdness: they formed coteries held together by bonds of mutual vice; they were ruled by instinct rather than discipline; they indulged in luxuries that were thought to sap the war effort. The identification of drugs with unorthodox sexual tastes continued into peacetime.
- - -
In November 1916, a parliamentary committee was appointed to investigate the use of cocaine in dentistry.
- - -
The Committee on Cocaine in Dentistry was the first enquiry into the drug in Britain: it concluded that there was no evidence "to show that there is any serious or, perhaps, even noticeable prevalence of the cocaine habit amongst the civilian or military population of Great Britain".
- - -
It was not only in the USA that drug-users were made into law-breakers in the 1920s. This was a European phenomenon, too. At the end of the First World War, the ratification of the International Opium Convention of 1912 was made one of the conditions of peace by the victorious powers. Article 295 of the Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919 bound the contracting powers to bring the Convention into force, and to enact the necessary legislation without delay.
- - -
"It ought to be obvious", [Aleister] Crowley asserted, "that if England reverted to pre-war conditions, when any responsible person (by signing his name in a book) could buy drugs at a fair profit on cost price" - cocaine say at 16 shillings and heroin at 20 shillings instead of as many pounds - "the whole underground traffic would disappear like a bad dream." He admitted that such a policy might result in the fatal overdoses of "a few score wasters too stupid to know when to stop", but this should not be inconceivable so soon "after the war in which we sent our sturdiest sons as sheep to the slaughter".
- - -
The death of Billie Carleton in November 1918 was probably caused by Veronal, although the newspapers made her name synonymous with cocaine. A month later the death by Veronal poisoning of Mary Elvira Boshell (1896-1918), a voluntary wartime nurse from a prosperous background, was widely publicised, though with less sensational overtones. Grieving for a fiancé who had been killed in action, she "worked herself to death on the battlefield, and was suffering from shell-shock and internal strain", which led her to inject morphine and dose herself with Veronal obtained by a tampered-with medical prescription.
- - -
The First World War, like the Prussian wars of 1866 and 1870, raised European drug consumption. [...] An Englishman in 1924 described his soldier brother-in-law who had become addicted to morphine after being treated for wounds received in trench warfare. [...]
The disturbance of post-war conditions both stimulated and facilitated drug-trafficking. "An unexpected result of the World War is the spread over Europe of the abuse of narcotics," a Belgian medical correspondent reported in 1923. "Before the war this was almost unknown in Belgium, but at present more persons are engaged in illicit traffic in drugs than ever before, and the number of drug addicts is constantly increasing. Some persons attribute the situation to the large number of foreigners in the country - diplomats, journalists, spies, officers." Herluf Zahle (1873-1941), who led the Danish delegation to the League conference on opium of 1924-5, urged fellow delegates to "protect" the young "against a peril ... not unconnected with the economic and resultant disturbances resulting from the terrible disaster of 1914". Refugees and the dispossessed needed drugs to cope with what the war had done to their lives.
- - -
The European nation that most firmly resisted American prohibition was the kingdom of the Netherlands. Dutch society was confident and united in the 1920s: the country had not fought in the World War, and maintained high levels of social and economic equilibrium afterwards. The Dutch Opium Act of 1919 (passed in accordance with the Hague resolutions) outlawed the production and trade in patent medicines containing opium and cocaine.
- - -
Trafficking by both Soviet officials and exiled White Russians in the Far East was a consequence of the disintegration of the Romanov Empire.
- - -
A police raid in 1924 unearthed proof that one dealer alone had supplied 501 kilograms of morphine to Hungary, a quantity sufficient to anaesthetise all Central Europe. Although Austria's annual medical requirements for morphine were about 60 kilograms, licensed apothecaries and wholesalers had received 210 kilograms, which suggested that 150 kilograms had either been "snuffed" in Austria or re-exported. The Vienna police knew of 200 cocaine-users in their city.
The wreck of the Hohenzollern Empire was as destructive as the fall of the Hapsburgs. Germany, like Austria, endured a terrible post-war inflation accompanied by material suffering and ethical decline. Pharmaceutical companies such as Merck had productive capacities that outstripped domestic demand. Consequently, the smuggling of dangerous drugs from German factories was a major problem during the Weimar Republic.
- - -
The Allied occupation of Germany facilitated the contraband drug trade. "French and allied soldiers became traffickers, tempted by the immense profits that the Germans held out to them," the physicians Courtois-Suffit and Giroux reported in 1921. Stricter vigilance by the Parisian police meant that cocaine-traffickers moved south to the ports of Marseille and Toulon, the coastal holiday resorts of Nice, Monte Carlo and Biarritz, as well as into the Alsace-Lorraine border region. "It is not rare to see members of the demi-monde, reduced to a state of frenzy, exchange their jewels and furs for the powder that inebriates."
Mais:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJunCsrhJjg
http://cdn.acidcow.com/pics/20120530/gifto_turn_on_tune_46.gif
Cocaine's reduction of self-control was part of its attraction for sex workers and their clients. The divisional police surgeon at Vine Street reported in 1916 that most users were prostitutes or Canadian soldiers; the majority were "snuffing it up the nose", but a few took it intravenously. A sergeant from the Canadian Military Police, who worked undercover in Soho during 1916, testified that the chief supply came from chemists' assistants in west central London.
- - -
British hostility to cocaine increased after the declaration of war. Forgetful of the importance of the Dutch in the cocaine business, the British Medical Journal in 1916 noted that "the production of cocaine was almost entirely in German hands" before the hostilities, and that most illicit suppliers were still "foreigners". The Vine Street policeman's remark that drugs sapped will power chimed with the alarm of the military authorities about a vitiated war effort. They became alarmed that the drug traffic could be used to undermine British fighting power and military discipline. "I am told that this evil practice is exceedingly rife at the present time," Sir Francis Lloyd (1853-1926), who was the general in command of the London district, declared of cocaine. "It is doing an immense amount of harm, I am told. They say that it is so ingrained that once you take it ... you will not give it up." His information was that cocaine was being used as "an aphrodisiac". Some prostitutes sold cocaine to 300 or 400 of the 250,000 Canadian soldiers who were passing through Britain on their way to the Western Front. Canadian military pay was five times greater than that of English soldiers, which made them "a natural mark" for prostitutes, as Brent lamented in June 1916. Canadians were "in a state of indignation ... amounting almost to revolt" over the corruption of their young men.
In response to these anxieties an Army Council order of 11 May 1916 decreed that soldiers in Britain would require a medical prescription to obtain barbiturates, benzamines, chloral, coca, cocaine, codeine, diacetylmorphine, Indian hemp, opium, morphine, sulphonal and any preparations or derivatives associated with these drugs. Shortly afterwards the Vine Street policemen secured a conviction against one of the dealers who had been denounced by the Belgian exiles. The police apparently exacerbated alarm by telling journalists that cocaine "is driving hundreds of women mad", which resulted in the Daily Chronicle blaring on 19 July that "the use of cocaine has become in six months a veritable mania, an obsession only too terribly common among the women who haunt the West End at night. Unhappily, too, this vicious craze has spread among soldiers." The same newspaper stated that cocaine was being "sold at a profit of 1,000 per cent". Stories circulated alleging that prostitutes were using cocaine to drug, stupefy and rob their johns. "The drug not only enslaves and ruins the whole constitution of its victim, being far more deadly than either opium or alcohol; but it directly promotes the committing of crime."
- - -
Delevingne's strategy against illicit drugs was strengthened by the imposition of stricter controls on cocaine and opium under Regulation 40B of the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) of 28 July 1916. This regulation was made at the request of the police commissioner, Sir Edward Henry, who had written a week earlier, with exaggeration, that the "evil" of cocaine was "rapidly assuming huge dimensions". Henry's information was largely second-hand: "As far as I can learn from reading it is the most baneful drug known." DORA had been introduced on the outbreak of war in 1914, and its regulations enabled the government to quell or quash anything that might jeopardise the prospects of British victory or assist the enemy. Munitions output was in its clutches; earlier restrictions on the supply of alcohol were intended to keep factory workers sober and productive. Regulation 40B suspended the more complicated minutiae of the Pharmacy Acts regulating the retail trade; the supply of dangerous drugs to troops became a criminal offence as did their possession by a civilian without medical prescription. It prohibited the import of cocaine and opiates except under licence, their possession without authorisation, and their supply by a pharmacist except under medical prescription.
- - -
Drugs were feared as a technique of foreign subversion. During 1917 the English author Beverley Nichols (1898-1983) was sent by the War Office to act as an agent provocateur of pacifists and defeatists at the Café Royal in Regent Street. His effeminacy aroused the hostility of vice policemen, who raided his rooms to search for drugs and question his landlady about male visitors. Devotees of drugs and sodomy both connoted threatening weirdness: they formed coteries held together by bonds of mutual vice; they were ruled by instinct rather than discipline; they indulged in luxuries that were thought to sap the war effort. The identification of drugs with unorthodox sexual tastes continued into peacetime.
- - -
In November 1916, a parliamentary committee was appointed to investigate the use of cocaine in dentistry.
- - -
The Committee on Cocaine in Dentistry was the first enquiry into the drug in Britain: it concluded that there was no evidence "to show that there is any serious or, perhaps, even noticeable prevalence of the cocaine habit amongst the civilian or military population of Great Britain".
- - -
It was not only in the USA that drug-users were made into law-breakers in the 1920s. This was a European phenomenon, too. At the end of the First World War, the ratification of the International Opium Convention of 1912 was made one of the conditions of peace by the victorious powers. Article 295 of the Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919 bound the contracting powers to bring the Convention into force, and to enact the necessary legislation without delay.
- - -
"It ought to be obvious", [Aleister] Crowley asserted, "that if England reverted to pre-war conditions, when any responsible person (by signing his name in a book) could buy drugs at a fair profit on cost price" - cocaine say at 16 shillings and heroin at 20 shillings instead of as many pounds - "the whole underground traffic would disappear like a bad dream." He admitted that such a policy might result in the fatal overdoses of "a few score wasters too stupid to know when to stop", but this should not be inconceivable so soon "after the war in which we sent our sturdiest sons as sheep to the slaughter".
- - -
The death of Billie Carleton in November 1918 was probably caused by Veronal, although the newspapers made her name synonymous with cocaine. A month later the death by Veronal poisoning of Mary Elvira Boshell (1896-1918), a voluntary wartime nurse from a prosperous background, was widely publicised, though with less sensational overtones. Grieving for a fiancé who had been killed in action, she "worked herself to death on the battlefield, and was suffering from shell-shock and internal strain", which led her to inject morphine and dose herself with Veronal obtained by a tampered-with medical prescription.
- - -
The First World War, like the Prussian wars of 1866 and 1870, raised European drug consumption. [...] An Englishman in 1924 described his soldier brother-in-law who had become addicted to morphine after being treated for wounds received in trench warfare. [...]
The disturbance of post-war conditions both stimulated and facilitated drug-trafficking. "An unexpected result of the World War is the spread over Europe of the abuse of narcotics," a Belgian medical correspondent reported in 1923. "Before the war this was almost unknown in Belgium, but at present more persons are engaged in illicit traffic in drugs than ever before, and the number of drug addicts is constantly increasing. Some persons attribute the situation to the large number of foreigners in the country - diplomats, journalists, spies, officers." Herluf Zahle (1873-1941), who led the Danish delegation to the League conference on opium of 1924-5, urged fellow delegates to "protect" the young "against a peril ... not unconnected with the economic and resultant disturbances resulting from the terrible disaster of 1914". Refugees and the dispossessed needed drugs to cope with what the war had done to their lives.
- - -
The European nation that most firmly resisted American prohibition was the kingdom of the Netherlands. Dutch society was confident and united in the 1920s: the country had not fought in the World War, and maintained high levels of social and economic equilibrium afterwards. The Dutch Opium Act of 1919 (passed in accordance with the Hague resolutions) outlawed the production and trade in patent medicines containing opium and cocaine.
- - -
Trafficking by both Soviet officials and exiled White Russians in the Far East was a consequence of the disintegration of the Romanov Empire.
- - -
A police raid in 1924 unearthed proof that one dealer alone had supplied 501 kilograms of morphine to Hungary, a quantity sufficient to anaesthetise all Central Europe. Although Austria's annual medical requirements for morphine were about 60 kilograms, licensed apothecaries and wholesalers had received 210 kilograms, which suggested that 150 kilograms had either been "snuffed" in Austria or re-exported. The Vienna police knew of 200 cocaine-users in their city.
The wreck of the Hohenzollern Empire was as destructive as the fall of the Hapsburgs. Germany, like Austria, endured a terrible post-war inflation accompanied by material suffering and ethical decline. Pharmaceutical companies such as Merck had productive capacities that outstripped domestic demand. Consequently, the smuggling of dangerous drugs from German factories was a major problem during the Weimar Republic.
- - -
The Allied occupation of Germany facilitated the contraband drug trade. "French and allied soldiers became traffickers, tempted by the immense profits that the Germans held out to them," the physicians Courtois-Suffit and Giroux reported in 1921. Stricter vigilance by the Parisian police meant that cocaine-traffickers moved south to the ports of Marseille and Toulon, the coastal holiday resorts of Nice, Monte Carlo and Biarritz, as well as into the Alsace-Lorraine border region. "It is not rare to see members of the demi-monde, reduced to a state of frenzy, exchange their jewels and furs for the powder that inebriates."
Mais:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJunCsrhJjg
http://cdn.acidcow.com/pics/20120530/gifto_turn_on_tune_46.gif
