A history of pleasure and pain
May 17, 2008
Drugs in their many and varied forms have been with us since the dawn of human history. A Melbourne Museum exhibition is examining their changing roles through the ages, writes Kate Holden.
THERE CAN BE VERY FEW people out there who have not been on drugs at some time. Some are worn-down junkies hanging out for a fix; some rely on prescribed morphine to kill the pain of illness. Some take an aspirin every morning for their blood. Some unwind with a drink after work. Some cherish their bongs or ice pipe. Untold thousands of us use illicit drugs at some time, and almost all of us rely on pharmaceuticals.
The history of drugs is a tale of generals and specifics, and a new exhibition at the Melbourne Museum tells part of it. Drugs: A Social History, assembled by the Historic Houses Trust of NSW, is a brief but illuminating look at the way in which our feelings about "drugs" have evolved to the complex love/hate relationship of today. But whether as medicine or corruption, as relief-giving magic or mind-bending madness, these substances that can change our very minds and bodies have been part of human experience at least since the Sumerians got stoned on opium several thousand years ago. And ever since then drugs have been thoroughly bound in with politics, law, war, health, geography, economics and culture - in other words, normal life.
There is hardly a moment in history when people have not been off their faces, deliberately or not. The Romans had their lead-poisoning; the pre-Columbian cultures of the Americas their intoxicants and coco leaves; the ergot barley fungus secretly skewed the minds of medieval Europeans. Laudanum, the alcoholic tincture of opium, was extremely popular through the 19th century, and today cannabis is the most widely used illicit drug in Australia, while this year in Sydney alone an estimated 90,000 people will pop a tab of ecstasy.
Many of us are wired on caffeine, nicotine, or antidepressants as we go about our business every day, and Australians take more drugs (medicinal and recreational) than most other nations. The recent hand-wringing over teenage binge drinking (which seems to have overtaken anguish about drug addiction) suggests that we worry conscientiously about the potential for drugs to damage us and wreak havoc. But, as this exhibition illustrates, throughout history our attitudes to what is acceptable have wavered severely.
Drugs we now think of as dangerous and deeply illegal were once acceptable in every level of society. Think of Sherlock Holmes with his morphine needle, or Sigmund Freud with his fondness for cocaine. British naval seamen were issued their grog as a right and would mutiny without it. Aristocratic ladies in Europe and America once held fashionable tea parties in which they delicately injected each other with morphine. In the early 20th century one could buy bejewelled syringe cases from New York boutiques, and 70 years ago the most respectable hotel for foreigners in Shanghai would deliver heroin on a tray to a room.
This was partly because these substances were seen as more or less safe. While drugs have always been used for psychotropic or recreational effects, they also form a foundation of physical therapy. What doesn't kill can cure, as many a quack doctor spruiking dubious tonics declared through the centuries. Some of the ingredients of past medical treatments seem alarming these days: cocaine was often used as an analgesic; ether-taking was a fad for a while; cannabis cigarettes were recommended to children and invalids to improve the lungs. These remedies had not only powerful chemical effects. They had the prerogative of being self-administered, private, and often cheap: attributes that continue to appeal to users of what are the now-illicit equivalents, such as prescribed sedatives.
Drugs have always been in the home, as well as the surgery and the party venue. Included in the exhibition is a typical 19th-century family medicine chest. This friendly common object, not unlike modern homeopathic arrays, regularly included substances such as belladonna, poison oak, Spanish fly and opium, the latter used to treat everything from coughs to bed-wetting, hysteria and period pain.
Opium comes at the forefront of this exhibition and is given more space than all other substances. It has had a varied and significant history. The demon drug extracted from Papaver somniferum, made famous by Thomas de Quincey with his Confessions of an Opium Eater and Samuel Taylor Coleridge with his laudanum-induced poem Kubla Khan, as well as by heroin addicts William S. Burroughs, Billie Holliday, Kurt Cobain and Sid Vicious, was once "the aspirin of the Middle Ages" and was prescribed by Hippocrates as far back 400BC.
Opium-based substances soothed unbearable pain, got the British empire into China, caused a racist reaction against Chinese in Australia leading to the White Australia policy, and form a pillar of some nations' economies. They have become a crucial part of palliative care. At the same time they are considered one of the most malign and unforgivable of social ills, heroin use affecting up to 300,000 Australians and the circumstances of its addiction bringing untold distress.
OPIUM AND CANNABIS get large displays; the section on tobacco has a photograph of a hospital patient having a cigarette lit by a smiling nurse, and a short film about the history of BUGAUP, the graffiti campaign against tobacco advertising, as well as a collection of cigarette cards and cases that show how easily and pervasively some drugs are marketed while they are considered acceptable. Alcohol, too, is present - as it should be - but the exhibition makes do with some general remarks, a short look at sly-grog shops of the old days, a bottle of absinth (the Green Fairy) and a few alcopops. Perhaps alcohol requires its own comprehensive exhibition, considering what a complicated set of attitudes we have to this most enthusiastically beloved, sometimes destructive legal drug.
Amphetamines, despite the roaring and disturbing rise in the use of ice in recent years and the massive illegal industries surrounding the production and distribution of speed, are given curiously short shrift, as is LSD. Ecstasy, or MDMA, after its use by psychotherapists in the 1970s to unbind the emotions of patients, is now illegal and has since the 1980s been almost exclusively associated with "decadent" dance and raves, as an excerpt from a Four Corners report describes. Its "smiley face" logo has been familiar for years but things move with the times: the exhibition describes the recent appearance of a Harry Potter-branded tab.
The iconography of drugs, in fact, forms a tacit part of this exhibition. The displays show that aesthetics have played a part in the promulgation of certain drugs, with cases of 20th-century medicine packaging, suavely surgical hypodermic needles, the glossy, violently pink bottles of alcopops, lovingly decorated bongs and jaunty cigarette cards, not to mention psychedelic 1970s music posters. After all, drugs are often meant to make you feel good, even if, as in marketing, there may be deception beneath.
The subject of drugs throws an intriguing light upon the way we see ourselves, as much as what we do to ourselves with them. Whether as mum's remedy for a sore throat or one of the most transgressive things a person can do, as decadent entertainment, invitation to the poetic muse, gateway to epiphany, degraders of human dignity, killers or redemptive medicine, drugs have endured through - and helped shape - human history. While we fear some drugs and cherish others, this small but fascinating exhibition suggests that perhaps the little pill you pop in the morning might mean more than you think.
So what are you on?
Drugs: A Social History is at the Melbourne Museum until September 21.
