Sex, Drugs and Chocolate: The Science of Pleasure. Paul Martin

and draws forth earwigs, or other living creatures gotten into them.

      As far as I know, there have been no recent criminal prosecutions in Britain for using cannabis to dislodge unwelcome earwigs from ears.

      Cannabis was probably being used as a recreational drug when Shakespeare was writing, and he may have made cryptic references to it in his work. In Sonnet 76 he refers to ‘a noted weed’ and ‘compounds strange’ in the context of aiding his own creativity:

      Why is my verse so barren of new pride,

      So far from variation or quick change?

      Why with the time do I not glance aside

      To new-found methods and to compounds strange?

      Why write I still all one, ever the same,

      And keep invention in a noted weed,

      That every word doth almost tell my name,

      Showing their birth and where they did proceed?

      Some Shakespearian scholars suspect this to be a veiled reference to cannabis. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, scientists discovered possible chemical residues of cannabis in the remnants of seventeenth-century clay pipes that were recovered from the site of Shakespeare’s house in Stratford-upon-Avon. There were also firm traces of nicotine and cocaine. Whilst this discovery does not prove that Shakespeare himself took these drugs, it does at least confirm that they were being used in England at that time. European settlers took the practice of using cannabis with them to America, where George Washington later grew it for his own medicinal use. Cannabis was widely used in Victorian England for medicinal purposes. Queen Victoria herself took tincture of cannabis to relieve her royal period pains.

      The nineteenth century witnessed a rapid expansion in the variety of psychoactive drugs available and in the social attitudes towards them. The international opium trade was hugely profitable and imperial Britain was at the heart of it. Britain fought two naval wars with China to defend its economic interests by enforcing the lucrative trade in exporting its Indian-produced opium to that country. When the Chinese tried to stop Britain from trafficking the opium, the British enforced it through military might, fighting and winning the First Opium War of 1839–42 and the Second Opium War of 1856–58. The second war resulted in the complete legalisation of the opium trade. By then, British opium exports to China were worth more than China earned from exporting tea and silk.

      The use of opium in China at this time was widespread. The Chinese emperor himself is said to have used the drug and many Chinese government officials were regular opium-smokers. According to contemporary accounts, the proportion of people who smoked opium in certain parts of the country ranged between a quarter and half the population. An Englishman who had worked in China for many years during this period commented that when it came to the morality of selling and consuming opium, he could see little difference from alcohol. Both drugs were harmful if taken to excess, but they did little damage if used moderately. The only difference he had noticed was that the opium-smoker ‘was not so violent, so maudlin or so disgusting as the drunkard’.

      Morphine was first produced in 1805, when a German chemist extracted it from opium. Commercial production began in the 1820s. The drug is named after the Roman god Morpheus, who was the god of dreams. Morphine was originally taken by mouth. However, the development of the hypodermic syringe fostered a fashion for injecting it, which produced a bigger rush. The American Civil War, in which intravenous morphine was widely used as a battlefield analgesic, created large numbers of morphine addicts. The stable of opiate drugs further expanded in 1898, when the German pharmaceutical company Bayer synthesised diacetylmorphine, a derivative of morphine. They named it heroin, after the Latin for hero, because of its potent psychological effects. Heroin was initially hailed as a wonder drug which offered the therapeutic power of morphine without the risk of addiction. This claim was later dropped when experience revealed that heroin was anything but non-addictive.

      Cocaine became popular after yet another German chemist perfected a method for isolating it from coca leaves in 1859. The ready availability of cheap cocaine in the late nineteenth century triggered a global surge in its recreational use.

      Sigmund Freud has the dubious honour of being a pioneering and enthusiastic advocate of cocaine. In 1884 Freud published a notorious paper entitled ‘Über coca’ (‘On Coca’), in which he claimed that cocaine could alleviate or cure a wide range of disorders including indigestion, nervous debility, wasting, alcoholism, morphine addiction and impotence. He confidently asserted that the drug’s therapeutic benefits far outweighed any possible risks from excessive use. Freud practised what he preached, taking large quantities of cocaine himself and prescribing it to many of his patients and friends. One of them was Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, whose morphine addiction Freud attempted to cure with cocaine. Unfortunately, Freud succeeded only in transforming his hapless friend into a cocaine addict and, subsequently, a corpse.

      Before long, Freud was being accused of unleashing a new and dreadful type of addiction. When another of his patients died from an overdose of cocaine, Freud eased off administering the drug intravenously, although he continued to give it orally. In a paper published in 1887, he insisted that cocaine addiction was not an inherent property of the drug itself, but rather of the individual who took it. One of the few medical applications for which cocaine could be used safely was as a local anaesthetic. However, Freud failed to recognise the clinical significance of this at the time, leaving one of his Viennese rivals to take the credit and win international fame. Despite clear evidence that cocaine did not cure addiction, but was itself highly addictive, Freud continued to take the drug for relief from his migraines and a painful nasal condition. In letters to friends, he wrote of how applying cocaine to his left nostril had helped him ‘to an amazing extent’ and of his need for ‘a lot of cocaine’. Some uncharitable sceptics have suggested that Freud’s now largely discredited theories about the nature of the human mind might have been inspired by his consumption of this psychoactive drug.

      A largely forgotten feature of the nineteenth-century drug scene was the widespread use of medical anaesthetics for recreational purposes. One of the many discoveries made by the great English scientist Sir Humphry Davy was nitrous oxide, otherwise known as laughing gas. Davy pioneered its use as an anaesthetic. He also liked to entertain himself and his friends by getting high on it. In 1800, he described how inhaling the gas produced a feeling of detachment that lifted him from his earthly cares and caused him to pass, ‘through voluptuous transitions’, into sensations that were completely new to him. Davy’s friends even contemplated setting up a ‘nitrous oxide tavern’, in which punters could inhale the gas as an alternative to getting drunk on alcohol. Some London theatres offered patrons a blast of nitrous oxide to put them in the mood before a show. Much the same happened with chloroform, which was being used for purely recreational purposes barely a year after it had first been employed as a medical anaesthetic.

      Ether was another anaesthetic that enjoyed a vogue as a recreational drug. During the second half of the nineteenth century it became especially popular in Ireland, after Catholic temperance campaigners decreed that it was an acceptable alternative to alcohol – ‘a liquor on which a man might get drunk with a clear conscience’, as one priest put it. Up until 1890, when ether was classified as a poison, the Irish were drinking more than 17,000 gallons of the stuff each year. The occultist Aleister Crowley (of whom more later) liked to drink a morning ‘bracer’ consisting of half a pint of ether, brandy, kirsch, absinthe and Tabasco sauce.

      When swallowed, ether has an intoxicating effect comparable to that of alcohol. The intoxication is short-lived, however. It disappears within half an hour or so, leaving the drinker sober. Some ether-drinkers regarded this as an advantage. Others did not. Drinking ether could also be hazardous. The boiling point of ether is lower than body temperature, so it vaporises on contact with the inside of the mouth. Drinking it therefore tends to generate highly flammable belches and farts. In an age when drinkers were surrounded by naked flames, this could prove life-threatening. According to an account from Russia, where ether drinking was popular, one such explosion killed six people. The social attractiveness of ether-drinkers was further diminished by the drug’s side-effect of generating rivers of saliva. This led some users to inhale its vapours in preference