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of the deaths, and also because of the ideological meaning of the drug: it never lost its power as a drug of the lazy or dangerous savage. Coca-Cola took the cocaine out of the drink after a racist “scare” about black men on cocaine raping white women. Another source of racially motivated antidrug frenzy came from Charles Henry Brent. He was the Episcopalian bishop of the Philippines, though he went there only as ordered—“against my taste and with a repulsion for work in a Latin country.” In 1902 Brent set up a moral campaign against drug use, to the great surprise of his flock. In 1910, distressed over his own alcoholic brother, Brent wished all drugs illegal, and moaned, “Society is too selfish, too inconsiderate to give up its pleasant things for the sake of the weak.”3 Brent was just as fired up about “laziness, concubinage and gaming,” which he saw as connected to drugs through their “sensuality.” His model of righteous severity was widely followed. Drugs started to be seen as dirty—dirty business, dirty bodies.

Others disagreed. The French doctor and detox expert Oscar Jennings wrote in 1909: “It is as a rule assumed that the habitué is necessarily a drug fiend, a cheat and a liar…. That many morphia-takers are narco-maniacs is undeniable, but there are others whose self-control, in restricting themselves to the minimum of morphia necessary to comfort, is infinitely greater than that of an ordinary so-called moderate drinker.”4 Today’s “war on drugs” is more right-wing than left, but the temperance movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America was part of the left-wing, progressive movement. Indeed, the ideals of this progressive movement were abolitionism, women’s rights, religious freethinking, Indian rights, and temperance. The first big “muckraking” event, one of the establishing moments of American journalism, was about the drugs contained in patent medicines. Some customers were unaware of the drugs involved. But of course, people know if a remedy makes them feel happy, and when they shop again, they are likely to be knowingly purchasing happiness. People who sold cures with happiness drugs in them were not generally tricking their customers. Everyone understood that what was going on was the selling and buying of happiness drugs. People did not say that, because that is not the way they framed what was going on. But that is what was going on.

As a result of the muckrakers’ stories, the government passed the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 so that anything with active drugs in it had to be so labeled. Guess what? Drug use went up, not down. In 1907 coca-leaf imports into the United States were twenty times what they were in 1900. Cocaine was both licit and illicit. A Chicago clergyman provides us with a vivid image: one night in 1909 he saw some local boys outside his rectory and the next morning found empty bottles of Gray’s Catarrh Powder, each of which delivered eight grains of cocaine.5 A more aggressive law was championed and carried through by a Dr. Hamilton Kemp Wright; and Wright’s reports “raised sensational racist alarms about the cocaine debauches of southern blacks.” Wright convinced New York Democrat Francis Harrison to put his name on an act to control and tax opium and coca dealers. In these years, writes historian Davenport-Hines, “it had become almost mandatory to affirm that drug consumers were criminals or degenerates who were enslaved to their habits; that they threatened social order both in cities and the South, impeded business and retarded productivity.”6 As Thomas Blair of the Pennsylvania Bureau of Drug Control wrote in 1919, “the anti-narcotic propagandist has over-stated his case: Virtually there is no opposition, as there is in the matter of [alcohol] prohibition;…there is inertia on one hand and more or less hysteria on the other. The propagandist has had things largely his own way.”7

Cocaine passed out of favor for a while. When it showed up in the 1970s, it once again had connotations of productivity and happiness, but by the mid-1980s people once again