The most vivid cocaine abuse scene in literature was written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1890. “Sherlock Holmes took a bottle from the mantelpiece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff ... He thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction.”
Holmes was also a pusher. “It is cocaine,” he tells Dr Watson. “A seven-per-cent solution. Would you care to try it?”
The National Crime Agency believes that film and television dramas are glamorising cocaine and the government has pledged to clamp down on middle-class “lifestyle users” of Class A drugs. But the NCA is roughly 150 years too late, because the link between fiction and cocaine use has been embedded in our culture ever since Victorian times. British writers, artists and celebrities have long been hooked on this particular narcotic, creatively and sometimes actually.
Charles Baudelaire favoured hashish and opium. Aldous Huxley described his use of mescaline in The Doors of Perception (1954), inspiring Jim Morrison to choose the name for his band. Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road hyped on benzedrine. Hunter S Thompson took everything, all the time, and then took some more.
But for many British writers, cocaine was the drug of choice, so widely celebrated and condoned that it became a part of their lifestyle long before such a concept existed. Sherlock Holmes helped to make coke cool.
Advertisement
Just as celebrities and screenwriters normalise cocaine use today, so did their predecessors. Queen Victoria herself is thought to have favoured Vin Mariani, a tincture of wine and coca leaves invented by an Italian chemist in 1863 and initially marketed as a pick-me-up for depressed actresses.
Hailed as a wonder drug, cocaine was sold over the counter as a cure for everything from toothache to impotence. Peruvian “Wine of Coca”, users were assured, “sustains and refreshes both the body and brain and may be taken with perfect safety”. Ryno’s Hay Fever and Catarrh Remedy was 99.9 per cent pure cocaine.
Cocaine was removed from Coca-Cola in 1904 but the original drink invented by Atlanta pharmacist John Pemberton in 1885 contained extract of coca leaf: “an intellectual beverage” aimed at “scientists, scholars, poets, divines, lawyers, physicians, and others devoted to extreme mental exertion”.
Ernest Shackleton took “Forced March” cocaine tablets on his voyage to Antarctica in 1909, as did Captain Scott on his ill-fated South Pole journey a year later. The drug was also dripped into the eyes as a treatment for snow blindness. During the First World War, Harrods sold drug kits for soldiers labelled “A Welcome Present for Friends at the Front”, containing cocaine, syringes and needles.
But cocaine would not have entered the cultural bloodstream in the same way had the drug not been embraced by the literary establishment. For many writers, the narcotic was a way to counteract stifling Victorian respectability and unleash another side of human nature. Robert Louis Stevenson began using cocaine to treat his tuberculosis and wrote the first draft of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde during a three-day cocaine binge in 1885. The idea for the book came to him in a cocaine-induced nightmare, and some have interpreted Dr Jekyll’s “heightened faculties” as a side effect of cocaine addiction.
Advertisement
Just as every bank note in Britain is said to show a dusting of cocaine, so traces of the drug crop up repeatedly in English literature. Princess Puffer in Charles Dickens’s Edwin Drood shoots up with cocaine. A 2001 analysis of pipe fragments from William Shakespeare’s house found traces of coca, raising the intriguing possibility that the bard himself may have smoked the stuff.
But it was Sherlock Holmes and the curious case of cocaine abuse that lent the drug its enduring cachet. Doyle had Holmes use cocaine not just to demonstrate a Bohemian lifestyle but to show his advanced medical knowledge at a time when the new drug was seen as a cure-all tonic.
Six years before we find Holmes shooting up for the first time, Sigmund Freud, himself an addict, had published Über Coca, extolling the “exhilaration and lasting euphoria” produced by cocaine. Holmes uses similar language, describing the drug as “transcendentally stimulating and clarifying to the mind”.
Doyle was a doctor and the impact of cocaine addiction is evident in his most famous character. A full portrait of the impact of cocaine addiction would have depicted Holmes experiencing dizziness, mobility problems, anxiety, insomnia, headaches, depression, hallucinations and a massively increased risk of heart attack.
But from the beginning, Holmes shows signs of drug dependency. “For days on end he would lie upon the sofa in the sitting-room, hardly uttering a word or moving a muscle from morning to night. On these occasions I have noticed such a dreamy, vacant expression in his eyes, that I might have suspected him of being addicted to the use of some narcotic.”
Advertisement
Holmes justifies his habit as an escape from “the dull routine of existence” and Watson describes him as “alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition”. By The Final Problem, Holmes shows symptoms of coke paranoia, constantly disguising himself, convinced Moriarty is everywhere.
Conan Doyle killed off Holmes in 1891 and brought him back to life in 1894, the period known to Sherlockians as “The Great Hiatus”. In a subsequent story, Watson says that Holmes has been “weaned” off drugs although, like all addicts, his habit is “not dead, but merely sleeping”.
The great detective travelled to Tibet, Persia and France in those lost years, but perhaps Doyle also implied that he had disappeared in order to vanquish his addiction: that would make Sherlock Holmes not only the first person in literature with a serious cocaine habit but also the first to kick it.