Features

Everything has a history. Josh Hercus looks at some of the past uses for modern day drugs.
Giggle party
Most of you know that nitrous oxide is used in a wide range of things, from anaesthetics to speeding up cars. But it’s better known as “laughing gas” and back in the mid-1800s they had parties dedicated to the stuff. The posters advertising these parties got straight to the point. For extra effect, read these in a posh English accent “The effect of the gas is to make those who include it, either laugh, sing, dance, speak or fight according to the leading trait of their character.” It then goes on to say “the Gas will be administered only to gentlemen of the first respectability. The object is to make the entertainment in every respect, a genteel affair”. If getting high and fighting/laughing was a “genteel affair”, then what would they call being indecent? At the very least, this teaches us how to write a Facebook event invite with a bit of decorum.
 

Children’s soothing syrups
When you used to get sick, what did your parents give you? I bet it was some sort of lolly-water antibiotic thing or that Robitussin crap. Had you been around in the early 1900s, your terrible twos would have been all that more terrible with the cocktail of narcotics that they used to give children. An article published in 1910 in the New York Times stated that the “soothers” often contained “morphin sulphate, chloroform, morphine hydrochloride, codeine, heroin, powdered opium, cannabis indica,” as well as combinations of the lot. To put that into perspective, that’s like taking the equivalent of 0.01mgs of Charlie Sheen.

 
Cough syrups
While children had it quite bad, don’t think that adults missed out. From 1898 to 1910 heroin was marketed as a cough suppressant under the original name of “Heroin”. No, seriously – that’s where the name comes from. Not only that but it was meant to be the non-addictive morphine replacement that claimed to cure morphine addiction. The good thing was that it was apparently true to its name – heroin can suppress coughing quite well. The bad things were they it was much more addictive than morphine and it fucks you up something chronic. I’d rather try to cure my cough by eating something from Tokyo Garden.

 
A decent mixer
Laudanum made its first appearance over 500 years ago. It’s basically opium mixed with alcohol. Back then alcohol wasn’t quite as “refined” as we have it now, so just imagine squeezing out everything in a bar mat after a busy night, adding crack to it, then drinking it. Yeah, that’s pretty much how it tasted as well. It was used to treat anything from a cold to various heart diseases, and even diarrhoea. It was cheaper than a bottle of gin and wasn’t taxed because it was a “medicine”. The strangest part is that to this day it’s still used as a treatment.

 
Truth serum
During WWII, the US formed the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was the predecessor of the CIA. They developed a truth serum that was basically just concentrated THC from weed. It was surprisingly effective, causing the subject “to be loquacious and free in his impartation of information”, which sounds even more impressive because you don’t know what loquacious means. They tried out their serum on a New York crime lord’s enforcer, Del Gracio, by giving him a cigarette laced with the THC. He then proceeded to spill the beans about the logistics of their massive heroin operation. Naturally, the OSS increased the dose but this time Gracio ended up coma-ing out for two hours. No doubt he woke up with a craving for five Happy Meals and three bags of Twisties.
 

Mind control
A few years later the CIA raised the stakes. Project MK-ULTRA was an illegal CIA-run project that ran between the 50s and 60s as an attempt to find out which substances can alter the mind and body both positively and negatively, presumably to find some sort of über-drug to fight the Commies. Some assert that the CIA were having a crack at mind control. The participants were given mainly LSD but a wide variety of other drugs were also used. The creepiest part is that most of the participants didn’t even know they were ingesting the drugs. The CIA would casually go down to brothels, prisons and hospitals and secretly give people some drugs and just see what would happen. Thousands were involved and it’s thought that around $10 million US was pumped into the project, which was a lot of money back then. A few deaths have been associated with the project but no one will ever know the true count because most of the documents were destroyed by the CIA in 1973.