“Much, too, was gathered from two smokers whom I subsequently had under treatment, and a number of the American smokers, male and female, in this city, and some from California and Nevada, who have kindly come to my house to smoke, thus affording me unusual facilities for studying the effects of the drug, when thus used, on different individuals and upon the various systems, organs, and apparatuses of each.”
“Two of my male nurses very kindly obliged me by smoking the drug a number of times, thus affording me special facilities for study, as they were constantly under my observation, and I was able to note more closely and accurately both the immediate and remote effects upon the novice. Finally, I smoked myself a number of times, both in large and small amounts, and often to decided excess, so that I might be the better able to fully understand subjective symptoms. Otherwise I should have been obligated to depend upon the word of the habitual smoker, which is not always reliable.”
Science used to be wild. You could just smoke opium with your homies in a lab or bring the lab to your home, write down a hundred or two pages of your trips and come downs, and influence federal drug policy for decades. Now that’s research. My guy took the Green Goblin approach and I respect it.
On a serious note, self-experimentation was a much more acceptable method in the past when the infrastructure to set up randomized controlled trials (RCTs) wasn’t available like today. Today, we might consider someone self-experimenting “for the sake of science, bro” to be in need of some form of institutionalization. On the other hand, we still do have an industry based around the idea of performing genetic modifications at home through mass-produced kits, so how far have we really come?
To Kane’s credit, he does make some observations that hold up today.
“The very fact that opium-smoking was a practice forbidden by law seemed to lead many who would not otherwise have indulged to seek out the low dens and patronize them, while the regular smokers found additional pleasure in continuing that about which there was a spice of danger. It seemed to add zest to their enjoyment.”
To make something taboo is to coerce people into repressing any expression of desire for that thing, and that in turn makes it an exotic thrill or relief to indulge it as an escape from repressive conditioning or social norms. At least, that’s what an armchair psychoanalyst might suggest. In modern times, we’ve seen a strange trend of anti-drug education in K-12 schooling actually being associated with an increase in use long-term. One explanation is that students who would have had no interest in trying an illicit substance were now informed about it, and the hysteria around it inadvertently implied it was a common practice to skirt institutional authorities to partake in the subcultures that practiced drug use as a ritual. Kane himself notes that,
“The practice spread rapidly and quietly among this class of gamblers and prostitutes until the latter part of 1875, at which time the authorities became cognizant of the fact, and finding, upon investigation, that many women and young girls, as also young men of respectable family, were being induced to visit the dens… No one can question the fascination of a vice, the strength of a habit that will lead people into such degradation for the gratification of the abnormal appetite.”
While the San Francisco Opium-Smoking Ordinance of 1875 was driven in part fears that Chinese men were corrupting young women by luring them into opium dens and either seducing or trafficking them, depending on which demonization upset the public more, Kane’s work points out that sexual immorality was associated with opium itself. Thus, even white young men using opium became an issue as far as the “protection” of women’s purity from such “abnormal appetites.” From an interview in the July 25, 1881 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle that Kane includes in his book:
“It will rapidly increase. The habit in past years, so far as whites were concerned, was confined to hoodlums and prostitutes mostly. Few decent men or women would care to come into Chinatown and smoke in the filthy dens here. Now that there are scores of places where the habit can be contracted in clean rooms and in respectable portions of the city, the practice will gradually extend up the social grade. Schoolboys and clerks who would never have gone into a Chinese den are already finding out the respectable places and learning to like the habit…”
Prior to modern addiction and drug use terminology, it was common to hear compulsive substance use referred to as “the habit” or “the vice.” We’re lucky enough actually to see a comparison between drinking and opium-smoking made here too:
“You know that there are some men who stand very high in the community who sometimes lose their balance and go on howling drunks. It’s nine chances to ten that if they are men moving in good society, they will wind up in the lowest dives on the Barbary Coast, where they drink the vilest whiskey they can get until they can be safely packed in a carriage and taken in charge by their friends. It’s part of the disease to want to get way down in the mud, and it’s the same with some opium smokers… The anti-opium-smoking ordinance drove the white smokers out of Chinatown, but the vice came along and scattered the smokers, planting them, in fact, in every portion of the city.”
Notably, the officer in this interview does refer to both the habit of drinking and opium-smoking as a “disease” well before a disease model had consensus from scientific institutions or the establishment of a group like Alcoholics Anonymous.