Unsuspecting Souls. Barry Sanders

it resembled a near-death experience. And then there it was again, something powerful, almost magnetic, pulling him back up to the heights of ecstasy. Oh, to be born and die and be reborn over and over again. It was the experience of the century—and, for a moment or two, a victory for the chemist in his laboratory that he could not help broadcasting to the rest of the world.

      So much did Sertürner crave the morphine experience, and so much was he a product of his own century, that he demanded a faster way to get the drug into his bloodstream. After all, speed was one of the great side benefits of the Industrial Revolution—faster travel, faster communication, and faster consumption. Sertürner read the zeitgeist; he wanted the high, and he wanted it right now. (High comes out of nineteenth-century street slang, first used around 1880.) But he never got his desire. Injecting drugs was not really possible until fifty years after Sertürner discovered morphine, when, in 1853, a Scottish doctor named Alexander Wood invented a crude hypodermic syringe, making it fairly simple for anyone to inject morphine directly into his or her own bloodstream.

      By the time of the Civil War, American surgeons on both sides regularly dispensed morphine to soldiers on the battlefield. Farmers cultivated poppies in both Union and Confederate territories, with Virginia, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Georgia as the major producers. One particularly well-liked Union surgeon, Major Nathan Mayer, who found giving injections much too cumbersome, poured generous amounts of morphine onto his gloved hands. Riding past the troops, he invited them, like so many puppies, to take a lick. It mattered not at all that morphine left the battlefield littered with addicts: Immediate pleasure trumped long-range pain. Could such a potent drug count as the secret of life? It could, indeed, but could not, it seems, hold on to its top position.

      For chemistry did not pause at the pure morphine stage for long. So intense was the search for more and cheaper ways to get hold of the spark of life that, in 1874, a pharmacist in London, searching for a nonaddictive alternative to morphine, boiled a batch of it with acetic anhydride, producing a substance with immensely powerful narcotic properties. (Though he did not know it, he had produced something highly addictive once more.) By 1898, a worker at the Bayer company in Germany had noted the amazingly powerful properties of that solution as a painkiller and, again quite accidentally, a cough suppressant. The head of Bayer’s pharmacological laboratory, Heinrich Dreser, tried the drug and called the experience absolutely heroisch, “heroic.” Like De Quincey, he had been yanked up to heaven and dropped into hell. His laboratory assistant exclaimed, after injecting a dose of heroin, “I have kissed God!” Such a tremendous high, experience tells us, brings with it an equally horrific downer.

      Beginning in November of 1898, Dreser marketed the new drug under the brand name Heroin. An anodyne of such heroic proportions, Dreser proclaimed, should go by no other name. By 1899 Bayer was producing over a ton of Heroin a year and exporting it to twenty-three countries. Nine years later, after learning of the terribly addictive qualities of his new product, Dreser tried to bolster Bayer’s reputation by marketing a much safer albeit less potent anodyne. Dreser succeeded in developing a pain reliever from natural ingredients, extracting from the willow plant the chemical salicin, which he marketed as a powder under the trade name Aspirin.

      In West Germany, meanwhile, another German chemist, Friedrich Gaedcke, was working to isolate the alkaloid of the coca leaf. His experiments proved successful around 1855, at which point he coined the name cocaine. The word appears for the first time in English in 1874. Here was another very powerful and very popular anodyne that physicians came to use as an anesthetic, in this case around 1860. The Coca-Cola Company used the coca leaves in its drink, which it advertised—in an understated way—as having great medicinal properties.

      In 1884, Freud wrote a famous research paper on how the drug affected levels of awareness, entitled, simply, “Über Coca” (“About Cocaine”). In the essay, Freud talked of “the most gorgeous excitement of ingesting the drug,” and goes on to sound out a testimonial for the drug’s “exhilaration and lasting euphoria, which in no way differs from the normal euphoria of the healthy person . . . You receive an increase of self-control and possess more vitality and capacity for work . . . In other words, you are simply normal, and it is soon hard to believe you are under the influence of any drug.” Freud recommended cocaine to cure morphine addiction and used it himself as an anodyne for about two years. Both of the drug’s manufacturers, Merck and Parke-Davis, paid Freud to endorse their rival brands. Freud was a believer, and his use of the drug, some people believe, led directly to his work on dreams.

      In that annus mirabilis, 1800, Sir Humphry Davy, a chemist, poet, and pioneer in electricity, came to the laboratory of a friend, Thomas Beddoes, in Bristol, England, called the Pneumatic Institute, to assume the role of supervisor. At his laboratory, Beddoes dedicated himself to exploring the healing effects on sick patients of inhaling various gases. The Pneumatic Institute was a popular place; the poets Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge frequented it to take what they called “the airs,” not for any particular illness, but for feelings of general well-being. In 1772, the English chemist Joseph Priestley had discovered an odorless, colorless gas that produced an insensitivity to pain. While working at the Institute, Davy purified that chemical compound and named it nitrous oxide. After his first inhalation, he quickly lauded its astonishing property of inducing feelings of euphoria.

      Completely taken with his discovery, Davy immediately announced to his colleagues that he had stumbled upon the true philosopher’s stone. He dazzled various assemblies of friends by inhaling his odorless gas and then sticking pins and needles into his body without any noticeable pain, giggling like a child through the entire experience. That proved, he declared, that he could control life, for he had located the seat of all feeling and sensation. Even the esteemed psychologist William James devoted an entire essay, which he published in the journal Mind in 1882, to the “fleeting brilliance of nitrous oxide inhalation.” Titled “The Subjective Effects of Nitrous Oxide,” James’s article extols the virtues of finding insight by inhaling the gas: “With me, as with every other person of whom I have heard, the keynote of the experience is the tremendously exciting sense of an intense metaphysical illumination.”

      Robert Southey, one of the wilder poets of the period, on one of his trips to Beddoes’s laboratory, tried the odorless gas and praised it as the highest order of religious experience: “I am sure the air in heaven must be this wonder working gas of delight.”⁶ That was enough for Davy to keep his research alive on what came to be called in the period the famous “factitious air.” With James Watt, another wizard of the invisible—the inventor of the steam engine—Davy built a nitrous oxide chamber, in which people could absorb the wondrous gas through all the pores of their body. After one such session in his own chamber, Davy wrote the following paean to the power of the invisible, in his diary: “Nothing exists but thoughts. The universe is composed of impressions, ideas, pleasures and pain.” Another session in the chamber prompted the following poem from Davy: “Yet are my eyes with sparkling luster fill’d/Yet is my mouth replete with murmuring sound/Yet are my limbs with inward transports fill’d/And clad with new-born mightiness around.”⁷

      In England, nitrous oxide became a popular plaything. One of the features of traveling carnivals through the countryside of England was something called “nitrous oxide capers,” where for a few pence people could enter a tent, inhale the wonder gas, and giggle their hearts out. They staggered so dizzily that they, themselves, became part of the amusement. Inhaling intoxicants became a staple of British life. Traveling mountebanks, calling themselves professors, would extol the virtues of, say, nitrous oxide or ether, and then invite audience members to step forward and breathe deeply.

      A group of amateur scientists, who called themselves the Askesian Society, fueled their curiosity with group inhalations of nitrous oxide. After serving some time with the Society, a young member named Luke Howard gave a lecture to the group, in 1802, on the most evanescent thing imaginable, clouds—one vapor seeming to be as good as any other. He had done something, he said, that no one else had ever done—a taxonomy of clouds. The names he chose—cirrus, stratus, cumulus, and nimbus—meteorologists still use today. Believing that nitrous oxide had provided him with his revelation about the new science he had launched, meteorology, Howard came back to the gas so many times he became addicted.

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