A couple of days ago I put up an old advertisement for medicinal heroin. After seeing it, a reader sent me this advertisement to go with it.
(Click the image for a larger view)
Those were the days . . . I wonder how many teething children were fed that stuff, and became (at least mildly) addicted as a result?
Peter
At the time, a working man's salary was $1.00 for a ten hour day, a 1200 sq. ft. house was $1,000, and a box of .22 Longs was 12 cents.
ReplyDeleteFifteen cents took an hour and a half to earn, so not many kids developed a taste for "snow."
Although they had a cheap source. Cocaine was the "Coca" in Coca Cola.
Things go better with Coke...no, that can't be right.
ReplyDeleteLaudanum (opiate) was recommended for crying babies, but these drops were for toothache, as in cavities/decay/broken teeth, not particularly for teething.
Next time you're over, I have for you a repro copy of a 1900s Sears catalog with all sorts of that kind of good quack in it. Look up "Heidelberg electric belt" for a shocking example...
ReplyDeleteIt wasn't all that many years ago (and even continues to this day in some areas) that the remedy for a crying, teething child was to rub their gums with whiskey.
ReplyDeleteProbably not very many. At the time cocaine was mostly used as a local anesthetic, and it wasn't anywhere nearly as refined as the modern, abusable form. Like DXM being antitussive in small doses and a dissociative in large doses... dose makes all the difference.
ReplyDeleteI'll bet my lunch people 100 years from now will look at we the same way.
ReplyDeleteJim
And yet somehow civilization survived.
ReplyDeletePerhaps they didn't know they were supposed to become addicted?
(WV: "ovidsm". Followers of Roman poetry.)
While it is true that we cannot be certain now of the number of addicts and abusers of opiates and related drugs at the beginning of the 20th Century, it is worth noting that the passage of laws restricting the availability of opiates and cocaine, beginning with the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914, was motivated by a widely held view at the time that addiction had become a serious problem. A Congressional committee in 1918 estimated the number of opiate and cocaine users at 1 million. Given that the population of the country at the time was only about 103 million, that figure, if accurate, represented a large percentage of the adult population. In any event, it is apparent that people at the time saw substance abuse as a significant problem requiring some kind of governmental response.
ReplyDelete"Religion is the opiate of the people." But I once read that for a surprisingly large number of farm women back then, the religion wasn't enough, and they spent much of their days in a laudanum haze.
ReplyDeleteToday, I think some people are taking an awful chance on the quality of their afterlife by denying sick people the relief offered by such "drugs" as morphine, opium, marijuana, and LSD.