“History, now!”: what kind of drug, when and why was it

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Drugs are scary. They symbolize addiction, social decline and health risks. Drugs are also enchanting because they promise a journey to better worlds or a boost in productivity. Who uses what drugs and why has changed over and over again over the centuries.

Already in antiquity, the potent milky juice of unripe poppy bolls was known: opium. Luxury goods grew in Anatolia. It was known as a miracle cure for chronic pain and insomnia – its most famous user was Marcus Aurelius, himself a Roman emperor.

Pharmacists have turned drugs into a business model

Drugs were desirable even in the era of colonialism and global trade. The pharmacists turned it into a business model: they mixed medicines with raw materials from all over the world and sold them on the spot, from Caribbean guaiac wood to bezoar stones from India. But not all intoxicants were happy to travel: Andean coca leaves lost their potency when they crossed to Europe – so they initially remained the drug of enslaved forced laborers in the silver mines of South America.

Ordinary opium existed in Britain at the time of industrialization. Working-class babies were fed baby syrup containing opium so they could sleep and the mothers could return to factory work the next morning. The substance was also cheap, a dose costing only a penny. Dozens of children became addicted. Doctors had even easier access to this substance. They consumed pure morphine, the opium of the wealthy. A famous Swiss woman also became a morphine addict in the early 20th century: the daughter of entrepreneur, photographer and lesbian icon Annemarie Schwarzenbach.

Another drug made a world career out of Basel: LSD. Since the 1950s, Albert Hofmann’s discovery has been heralded as a miracle cure by a wide variety of groups: the CIA wanted to use LSD to brainwash people, psychiatrists wanted to use it to treat the “crazy”, and hippies wanted to change the world. In search of cheap things and self-realization, thousands emigrated from Morocco to India along the hippie trail. Above all, however, “roving” drug smugglers have caused problems in other parts of the world. In 1969, Nepal took action and expelled more than 50 hippies from the country, deporting them instead of sending them to the paradise they hoped for.

In the 1980s, all of Europe looked with horror at the Zurich Platzspitz: heroin addicts shot the next portion in front of everyone, and some died in public. It was believed that drug addicts only think about themselves. However, structures of solidarity also dominated the open stage: Filterlifixers traded clean syringes for heroin residue in cigarette filters (hence their name) and guarded consumers’ belongings. They traded and consumed together.

In the late 80s, techno came, and with it ecstasy. Drug parties were a non-political pastime, not a counterculture: regular work and weekend reboots went hand in hand. Drugs were now part of the work-life balance for the purpose of self-improvement—a precursor of sorts to yoga during lunch breaks.

The trail of drugs leads to the big world and back, to very different environments: the rich took different drugs than the poor. Drug use has sometimes been anti-capitalist, sometimes apolitical, sometimes social, sometimes selfish, and the drug trade has always been good business.

Source: Blick