Drugs were always known to be dangerous, but were not formally outlawed until this century. The fictional Sherlock Holmes took cocaine to relieve boredom, rather against Dr Watson's advice. But a real life doctor at the time might may well have recommended it. Cocaine was purified from the coca plant in 1884: in 1887, an American neurologist was extolling its virtues as a tonic, at the rate of two grains to a pint of wine.

By the end of the decade the Parke-Davis Company in the US sold it over the counter in 15 forms, two for smoking and sniffing. Physicians introduced the hypodermic needle as a procedure less likely to foster addiction to opiates, and Parke Davis supplied the cocaine in a handy kit complete with syringe.

The advertising rubric said that the drug could ``make the coward brave, the silent eloquent and...render the sufferer insensitive to pain.''

It was available in a number of forms: Coca-Cola was introduced in 1886 as a temperance drink offering the virtues of coca without the vices of alcohol.

For most of human history, mood-altering drugs were available, usually in `raw' or dilute form. When refined, they were often introduced as helpful medicines, and their prohibition across the Western world was piecemeal.

Laudanum, a derivative of opium, was a notoriously addictive painkiller, but people in pain welcomed it.

The young newspaperman Rudyard Kipling, later to become the poet of Empire, fell ill of a fever in Lahore in 1884. His manservant rolled him two pills of opium and gave him a pipe. ``I wasn't in a condition to argue,'' he told his aunt in England. ``I fell through the floor.

When I woke up I found my man waiting at the bed side where he had put me, with a glass of warm milk and a stupendous grin.'' He turned the experience into a lurid short story of life in an opium den.

But chemists wanted to isolate whatever was in the raw opium. Bayer in Germany in 1898 marketed a white powder called heroin, synthesised from its morphine parent more than two decades earlier. It was sold over the counter in syrup as a cough mixture (``will suit the palate of the most exacting adult or the most capricious child,'' a New York advert claimed).

The Observer News Service

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.