The Seven Sisters of Sleep

More book stuff about drugs.   In this case, a book written in 1860 by Mordecai Cooke, intended as a definitive guide, at the time, on how to get f**ked up.  Or rather, how people around the world got high back them.   Cooke has been accused to writing this to suggest that what they do in China or India or South America is appropriate for them and not for UK souls, but I didn’t get that impression.  What Cooke was going for was suggesting that our natural nightly downtime had some competition from various inebriants of varying quality and potency, scattered across the globe.  

These were 1) tobacco, 2) opium, 3) cannabis, 4) betel nut, 5) coca, 6) Datura (aka Jimson weed), and 7) fly agaric (Europe’s magic mushroom). 

Tobacco – why does this qualify as a sister of sleep?  Isn’t nicotine a stimulant?  MC cites an 18^th century priest railing against the drug citing blackened lungs of heavy smokers revealed in autopsies.  So in the 1700s they knew what tobacco did!  Amazing.  But to read Cooke’s account, you would think that tobacco was LSD.  So far it’s a chapter on tobacco itself, then a chapter on smoking it in pipes, a chapter on snuff (tobacco consumed in the nose), and the next on chewing tobacco (most popular in the US where everyone spits).  Finally a chapter on “pretenders” (tobacco substitutes of various types, none of which he considers comparable though acknowledging that others do).

 

Finally we can move on… to opium.  After a tedious chapter on how opium is made (like anyone needs to know) he proceeds to finally tell us: WHAT DOES IT DO.   And so far as I can tell it’s the LSD of the 1800s.  Except that it’s addictive.  Thank you, Albert Hofmann. 

In fact there are not just one but – as with tobacco - several chapters on opium.  And what I found surprising was this.  By now we’ve been consistently presented with the spectacle of the opium addict, reduced to poverty and crime, health ruined, to support his habit.  But apparently there were “chippers”, occasional users, who may have used regularly but probably more like once a month instead of daily.  These opium users show no health issues, lived long healthy lives, and had normal lifestyles.  In other words, they were not addicts.  Overall Cooke takes the position that opium is actually no worse than alcohol in terms of aggregate damage caused to its users and society as a whole (what economists would refer to as negative externalities).  He observed that drunkards frequently became extremely violent under the influence of alcohol, whereas chronic opium users retreated into a dreamlike catatonia which threatened no one other than the user himself.  The real problem for either substance is excessive consumption, not consumption per se.

Next, there’s an extensive section on HEMP and HASHISH, with the inevitable reference to Assassins from Syria.  From what he says, recreational cannabis use was well known at that time, except that it was extremely uncommon as such in the Western world – that is to say, hemp was well known in its non-marijuana properties but cannabis was only smoked recreationally outside the Western world, with the Middle East being a consistent consumer of hashish, which is highly concentrated marijuana.  He makes some brief mentions of Fitzhugh Ludlow, who was a contemporary of his.  In fact, it would seem the express reason for Ludlow to write his book, The Hasheesh Eater, was specifically because marijuana and hashish were so little known in the US at the time.  Oddly, although Ludlow’s book was published in 1857 and reissued several times in the following decade, Cooke makes no specific references to it.  Apparently he didn’t read it.  For that matter, I don’t see any evidence that Cooke actually even tried hashish.  And that looks to be the case with the majority of the exotic substances he chronicles.  I would hope he at least smoked tobacco or drank alcohol.

Next is a chapter on coca leaves, mainly consumed by the Indians of Peru.  The active ingredient is cocaine, which was synthesized soon after this book was written, and acts as a more concentrated version of the coca leaf.  From Cooke’s writing it does not appear that coca leaves were exported abroad for recreational consumption, and my impression is that cocaine itself was initially marketed as a legitimate drug before being banned and turned – much later – into the rich and famous party drug.  Even so, although far less concentrated and effective than cocaine, chewing the leaves did produce a substantial narcotic effect and this practice counts as a form of recreational use, which was popular and widespread in that part of the world at that time.

Next are chapters – only one each – on eating clay/dirt/lime (quicklime/whitewash); low doses of arsenic, obviously a poison in higher doses, but also addictive and with no apparent narcotic properties; Datura, belladonna, and henbane, all of which appear to cause hallucinations but possibly death.  Betel Nut stains your teeth and makes you high.  Apparently he did not try it.

Finally, one chapter on fly agaric (magic mushroom), which mainly grows in Siberia and the far east of Russia, in Kamchatka (remember RISK?).  The big fun thing about this is that the active ingredient survives unscathed into the user’s urine.  The same person, or someone else, can conceivably drink that – if so inclined – and trip all over again.  Even Cooke couldn’t ascertain if there was a limit on how many times it could be so “recycled”.  But since Mexican mushrooms, which appear to be the strongest and most trippiest of all the psychedelic varieties (psilocybe cubensis), were not commonly known outside the little villages in Mexico until Gordon Wasson blew the whole scene open in the late 1950s, Cooke would have been oblivious to that branch of the shroom tree.