Having a high old time

BRITON Dr Norman Kerr, in 1884, asked “Is it a sin, a crime, a vice or a disease?”

Walking around, perusing High Society: Mind Altering Drugs in History and Culture, a comprehensive and beautifully curated exhibition of ‘getting out of it’ through the ages, one thing is obvious — this is the second favourite pastime of human beings, after sex. Our desire to alter our consciousness transcends time, class and culture — historically, the only group of people known to anthropology who did not use psychoactive substances, according to Stuart Walton, in his book, Out Of It: A Cultural History of Intoxication, is the Inuit — “for the only good reason that they were the only culture unable to grow anything”.

The rest of the world has been at it since we fell out of our collective tree. Drugs have played a profound part in our history, perhaps even our evolution. Nietzsche called the history of drugs “almost the history of ‘culture’” while ethnobotanist, Terence McKenna, in his radical, 1992 book, Food of the Gods, says it was the ingestion of psychoactive substances that got apes onto the ground in the first place, transitioning onto their hind legs, towards early hominid life, by eating plants that got them out of their heads and raised their consciousness.

To anyone who has used psychedelics, this makes perfect sense. Aldous Huxley, describing his mescaline use in his 1954 book, The Doors of Perception (the book after which Jim Morrison named his band), describes experiencing “sacramental vision”.

High Society looks at all aspects of drugs throughout human history. Mike Jay, co-curator of the exhibition and author of a book of the same name, says “the drug experience has been as widely documented by artists and writers as by scientists and medics, often inspired by their personal subjective experiences. We’ve been able to draw on a wide range of material from across disciplines … [which] invites the visitor to question our modern attitudes, in the light of other times and cultures.”

In other words, drugs were not invented in the 1960s. Nor do they just involve crack pipes or needles. We all use them, all the time, in varying degrees of potency — caffeine, nicotine, alcohol — and impose value judgements on ‘good’ drugs and ‘bad’ drugs, depending on the era in which we are living; marijuana, cocaine, heroin, amphetamines, and psychedelics are illegal, while fags and booze are not. In the past, it was the other way around: you could buy heroin and cocaine over the counter, but tobacco, coffee and alcohol have all been illegal at various times.

“By 1890, [cocaine] was being sold in pharmacies as a cure for alcoholism, asthma, the common cold, whooping cough, dysentery, haemorrhoids, neuralgia, seasickness, vomiting in pregnancy, sore nipples, vaginismus, gonorrhoea and syphilis, as well as for morphine and opium addiction,” writes Tim Madge, in White Mischief: A Cultural History of Cocaine. Crikey.

In one glass case at the exhibition, there is an almost century-old bottle of medicine accompanied by a 1914 advert for Smith’s Glyco-Heroin, recommended for bronchitis, asthma, laryngitis, pneumonia and children’s coughs. A lower dose was recommended for children under three years. These days, children taking heroin would be straight out of Irvine Welsh or The Wire.

Our perceptions remain profoundly influenced by a drug’s legal status — this month, a study in the Lancet, co-authored by Professor David Nutt, the former chief drugs adviser to the British government, showed that in health and socio-economic terms, alcohol is far more dangerous than heroin. This is a fact we culturally reject (Professor Nutt was sacked by the government last year for making similar assertions). Not that smack isn’t highly addictive and not that it doesn’t destroy lives. This is illustrated by the twin paintings of wealthy, 18th century Chinese merchants smoking opium: in the first painting, they are in opulent surroundings; in the second painting, they are in rags and tatters. Centuries later, the same message was conveyed in the UK government’s 1986 anti-drugs campaign, Heroin Screws You Up. But so does alcohol — many thousands of times more frequently than heroin — except it’s legal. Drugs are fetishised and demonised — we take our milder drugs for granted, (caffeine in Europe, betel nut in Asia, coca leaf in South America, kava in the Pacific) and wage ‘war’ against the more potent. High Society shows more than 200 exhibits, from Coleridge’s original Kubla Khan manuscript, written in spidery script while he was high on opium, to diagrams of three spiderwebs constructed by spiders fed caffeine, benzedrine, and cannabis by NASA scientists (the stoned spider built the neatest, most ordered web — the other two were all over the place).

There are films of native South American tribes people ‘off their trolleys’ on powerful psychedelics in collective, shamen-led rituals, while one darkened room contains nothing but three walls of giant, moving poppies, which has a surprisingly beautiful effect; there is even a replica of Beat artist Brion Gysin’s 1962 Dreamachine, whirling around and spinning colours like a speeded-up, child’s night light. A visitor sits in front of it, eyes closed, hypnotised, intoxicated by his own brain waves. Because that’s what humans like to do — we are compelled to change the way we feel, by any means available, no matter how mildly or temporarily. Just think of how it feels when you really, really fancy a cup of tea. Why? Because it perks you up. We use everything — from tea to E to PCP — to change the way we feel.

Apart from the fascinating collection of High Society’s artefacts — from ancient, clay tobacco pipes to brass sculptures of crack pipes, to 11th century poppy remedies made by Suffolk monks to Victorian, cocaine eye drops — what sets this exhibition apart is its neutrality. It observes humans’ in-built leaning towards inebriation. Today’s global drug trade is estimated by the UN to be worth $320bn a year, with new drugs appearing all the time. No amount of ‘war’ is ever going to stop humans from wanting to alter their mood feel via external means; this is not about whether drugs should be decriminalised. It simply shows how we use them.

But what about addiction? Legality aside, not everyone can use drugs safely. Some people are highly susceptible to addiction, and some drugs are hugely addictive — a huge black-and-white photograph of three women, their faces blank, smoking crack from plastic cola bottles, is a portrait of pure desolation. There is no pleasure, only need. But in the days before The Priory or Narcotics Anonymous, what did people do? If you were being prescribed cocaine while pregnant, and heroin for whooping cough, what happened if you became hooked and needed to stop? Well, you could have always checked into High Shot House, in Twickenham, Middlesex, which, in 1879, promised respite to “gentlemen suffering from inebriation, the morphia habit and abuse of drugs”. Treatment included playing billiards and taking in the local architecture. Its success rate remains unknown. It would be another 56 years before the 12 Steps came along.

Meanwhile, we continue, and will always continue, to seek intoxication. The desire is part of us.

“Intoxication is so uncontrollable, because it is lustrously coloured with the deepest dyes of subjectivity,” writes Stuart Walton, in Out Of It. “It reminds you, gloriously, that you exist, that you are capable of quite different forms of consciousness from the one you wake up in each morning.” Just be selective in your drug of choice. Television and refined sugar are drugs, too, you know.