by Stephen Fry
The Early Days
The first effect of cocaine is of … nothing. You don’t get the huge, whoomping, rushing high that is said to be the reward of heroin or of crystal meth and crack. I haven’t tried any of those because I am a squeamish wimp. Perhaps this denies me any credit as a true addict. Friends like Sebastian Horsley and Russell Brand, the late Philip Seymour Hoffman and all those rock stars of the 1970s who were unafraid to put a flame under a spoon, suck the juice into a syringe, tighten a tie round their biceps with their teeth, pump their fists and tap with two fingers until they found an available vein, whether it be, once the more available ones had hardened into uselessness, a vein in their eyeball or their penis, then plunge the plunger, they were surely the true addicts. I got the word ‘squeamish’ from an article I read by Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriting phenomenon who gave the world A Few Good Men, The West Wing, The Social Network and The Newsroom. He was taking a break in rehearsals with Philip Seymour Hoffman and, as an ex-coke fiend, was saying to him that he’d always been too squeamish to inject himself, otherwise he supposed he’d have been a junkie. ‘Stay squeamish,’ was Hoffman’s (typically) curt reply. It wasn’t too long after that that he himself was dead. Twenty-three years ‘clean’ and then one back-slide and it was all over. It’s rather like nuclear weaponry: you can never say it is safe because it has only been safe up until now; it needs to be safe for all time: one moment of not being safe, and the whole game is up.
So, back now in London in 1986 for my first experience of taking coke. I nervously watch my friend take out a folded wrap of paper, open it and shake out a heap of granular white powder on to a metal tray on the table beside him. He takes out a credit card and with its edge chops gently until the powder is as fine grained as he can make it. He uses the edge to sweep this pile into five equal lines, rolls up a ten-pound note, bends down, applies the end of the tube to one nostril and the other end to the first line and with a sharp snort sucks in half of it. He takes the remaining half of his line up the other nostril and then passes me the rolled-up tube.
With as much nonchalance as I can muster I reproduce his actions. My hand is trembling a little, and I am more than a little anxious not to imitate Woody Allen’s notorious sneeze in Annie Hall. My bent nose has gifted me a deviated septum, which means that it is uncommon for both nostrils to be in full working order at the same time. I force as much suction as I can on my line with the weak left nostril and nothing moves. Embarrassed, I take the whole line up my clear right nostril with one huge snort. The powder hits the back of my throat and my eyes sting a little. The other three, also neophytes at this ceremony, take their turns.
I sit back, expecting hallucinations, a trance, bliss, euphoria, ecstasy … something.
Our host, as is his right, licks his forefinger and sweeps up the residue of powder, pushing it round his gums.
‘Er …’ says one of our number braver than me, ‘what are we supposed to feel?’
‘You get a bit of a buzz’ – the expert claps his hands together and exhales loudly – ‘and you feel just … good. That’s what’s so great about coke. It’s kind of subtle?’
Up until this time the only illegal drug I had ever tried had been dope, which I had been rather ashamed of strongly disliking. Cannabis, even the milder versions of grass and resin available back then before the age of skunk and buds, was certainly not subtle, neither in effect nor in after-effect. In 1982 I had once vomited all over, around, above and below the lavatory of a friend’s house only a few months after coming back from our Footlights tour of Australia. I can’t remember any discernible pleasure at any stage and had more or less foresworn the weed. Most people have a drug that suits them, whether it is nicotine (not much of a behavioural modifier), coffee, cannabis, alcohol, ketamine, crystal meth, crack, opium, heroin, speed, MDMA/Ecstasy. I had decided early on that cannabis was not for me, but I hadn’t for one second considered replacing it with another one.
Sitting back now and inspecting the effect of the cocaine, I have to confess to noticing finally a benevolent stimulation. I observe too that we are all inclined to talk a little more. Mostly over each other, without listening, a feature I will soon come to recognize very clearly.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF BLOW
Cocaine (if you call it ‘blow’ you sound hipper and cooler), as most people know, derives from the coca plant, indigenous to South America, principally Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. The leaves of the plant are freely and legally available in those countries to chew or to make into a tea known as a mate and are said to help humans cope with the fatigue and altitude sickness associated with the high Andes. Ingestion of these leaves or infusions doesn’t impart a fraction of any of the euphoria or stimulation associated with cocaine, but they are said to be rich in all kinds of vitamins, minerals and fibre.
When I was in South America in my puffing, wheezing cigarette-smoking days, locals there encouraged me to chew the leaves with lime, or to add lime juice to the mate, in order to speed up the (very mild) effect of coca and help me with the exhausting altitude. I suppose the process of adding lime is a gesture towards the acid/base extraction which turns coca into cocaine, the Class A scheduled drug, the billion-dollar industry, the working-class, media-class, rural and urban community must-have weekend companion that has been growing and growing in popularity since the 1970s and still shows no sign of declining. A chief constable told me not long ago that it is easier to score cocaine in a market town in East Anglia than it is in Soho Square. It’s Lombard-street to a China orange* that there is more coke consumed on Friday and Saturday nights in Doncaster than in Chelsea. No one can call the substance cheap, but it has held its price pretty steadily over the past decade or so and it is now far from the preserve of the members of ‘trendy’ – as the word then was – Soho or Mayfair private clubs.
It was in the nineteenth century that the breakthroughs were made that turned this harmless, utterly non-addictive Andean bush-leaf into coca-ine (‘-ine’ is a suffix chemists give to alkaloids: coffee’s alkaloid is caffeine; the alkaloid of Atropa belladonna, or deadly nightshade, is atropine; and so on). Heroin, on the other hand, was so called by the Bayer Company of Germany, who gave us aspirin, because it was thought to confer heroic properties on the user.
No less a figure than Sigmund Freud was one of the first major medical figures to write on the properties of cocaine, which was a rara avis in the nineteenth century, inasmuch as most major drugs were narcotics, usually derived from the poppy family: morphine, opium, codeine and Queen Victoria’s favourite tipple, laudanum, which is morphine and alcohol combined: blissikins, as Nancy Mitford used to say. Freud’s book Über Coca contains some fascinating insights into the effect of this new drug on himself and his patients/volunteers/kidnapped tramps.
It seems probable, in the light of reports which I shall refer to later, that coca, if used protractedly but in moderation, is not detrimental to the body. Von Anrep treated animals for thirty days with moderate doses of cocaine and detected no detrimental effects on their bodily functions. It seems to me noteworthy – and I discovered this in myself and in other observers who were capable of judging such things – that a first dose or even repeated doses of coca produce no compulsive desire to use the stimulant further; on the contrary, one feels a certain unmotivated aversion to the substance.
As if and I wish …
The psychic effect of cocaïnum muriaticum in doses of 0.05–0.10g consists of exhilaration and lasting euphoria, which does not differ in any way from the normal euphoria of a healthy person. The feeling of excitement which accompanies stimulus by alcohol is completely lacking; the characteristic urge for immediate activity which alcohol produces is also absent. One senses an increase of self-control and feels more vigorous and more capable of work; on the other hand, if one works, one misses that heightening of the mental powers which alcohol, tea, or coffee induce. One is simply normal, and soon finds it difficult to believe that one is under the influence of any drug at al
l.
Freud drank while he worked? Oh, well, that explains everything … Just to repeat:
It seems probable, in the light of reports which I shall refer to later, that coca, if used protractedly but in moderation, is not detrimental to the body.
We’ll ignore the happy-sounding ‘sudden cardiac death’ that today’s doctors and rehab clinicians like to harp on about with what I can only call tactless relish.
Coca is a far more potent and far less harmful stimulant than alcohol, and its widespread utilization is hindered at present only by its high cost.
The cost issue is still true, I suspect, and there are certainly many, many more deaths from alcohol in the world than from cocaine. Even taking into account the wider use, death from sustained cocaine ingestion is, I think, moderately rare, but certainly not unheard of.
Long-term use of coca is further strongly recommended and allegedly has been tried with success in all diseases which involve degeneration of the tissues, such as anæmia, phthisis, long-lasting febrile diseases, etc.; and also during recovery from such diseases … The natives of South America, who represented their goddess of love with coca leaves in her hand, did not doubt the stimulative effect of coca on the genitalia.
Ask any seasoned cokehead, certainly a male one, and they will probably agree with those lines of the Porter in Macbeth, who is discoursing here about alcohol but may as well be referring to Charlie.
Lechery, sir, it provokes, and unprovokes;
it provokes the desire, but it takes
away the performance: therefore, much drink
may be said to be an equivocator with lechery:
it makes him, and it mars him; it sets
him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him,
and disheartens him; makes him stand to, and
not stand to; in conclusion, equivocates him
in a sleep, and, giving him the lie, leaves him.
Save that cocaine doesn’t ‘equivocate one in a sleep’ so much as leave one wide-eyed and drippy-nosed for hours upon end, staring at the ceiling and making promises for the morrow that one knows one will not keep.
Mantegazza confirms that the coqueros sustain a high degree of potency right into old age; he even reports cases of the restoration of potency and the disappearance of functional weaknesses following the use of coca, although he does not believe that coca would produce such an effect in all individuals.
Marvaud emphatically supports the view that coca has a stimulative effect; other writers strongly recommend coca as a remedy for occasional functional weaknesses and temporary exhaustion; and Bentley reports on a case of this type in which coca was responsible for the cure.
Among the persons to whom I have given coca, three reported violent sexual excitement which they unhesitatingly attributed to the coca. A young writer, who was enabled by treatment with coca to resume his work after a longish illness, gave up using the drug because of the undesirable secondary effects which it had on him.
So one patient became so embarrassed by the increased libido of the drug that he discontinued it. ‘Undesirable secondary effects’, indeed. A Viagra, a workhorse, a cure for numerous debilitating ailments, less dangerous or mind-altering than alcohol, cocaine was welcomed by the late nineteenth century and, as is well known, gave the drink Coca-Cola the first half of its name, although the company dropped it from the list of ingredients in 1929. It was available everywhere legally in pastille, pill or potion form as a tonic and often self-contradictory treatment, being most efficacious in the cure of constipation and magically helpful too for the firming of loose or watery stools. It aided concentration and work rate, it cheered melancholy and in smaller doses was remarkably effective in the calming of recalcitrant children.
This was all during a period known as the Great Binge, roughly designated by social historians as 1870–1914, after which the First World War came and spoiled everything: almost at the sound of the first martial trumpet, beer was weakened, licensing hours were decreased, and, in 1915, the French banned absinthe, the poster child of the Great Binge. In between, during the Binge itself, however, everything was on sale at your local chemist or drug store over the counter, no questions asked. Fortnum & Mason, the elegant and grand Grocers’ Royal of St James’s, sold tasteful hampers which included silver boxes containing syringes and étuis for doting parents to send heroin and cocaine to their sons in the South African War and early years of the Great War. Indeed, Benzedrine, the trade name of a kind of amphetamine or ‘speed’, was supplied to commandos throughout the Second World War as part of their usual rations. In the Ian Fleming novels, James Bond is hardly ever off the stuff. It was just my luck to be born into an era when virtually anything exciting, beguiling, enchanting, naughty and nice was furiously illegal. Those comedians and actors a generation above me who were worried about their weight would regularly go to their doctors and be prescribed as many ‘bennies’ as they wanted. Generally speaking, anything that speeds up and stimulates your metabolism will suppress your appetite. Downers like cannabis produce, as is well known, that undignified state known as the munchies. Groups of young men and women invading a twenty-four-hour petrol station loading up on Mars Bars, Doritos and great basketfuls of junk food are as clear a statement of an evening of passing joints around as you could get.
Maybe it is the very illegality of cocaine that drew me to consider becoming a user. Perhaps an echo of Sherlock Holmes and his Seven-Per-Cent Solution resonated in the back of the mind. Perhaps my sexuality, or even my Jewishness, had always made me believe deep down that I would never be normal. That I was forever to be an outsider, a transgressor.
Nowadays there is a war of catch-up going on: a running war between the drug enforcement agencies and the enterprising chemists out in the world. Change a molecule here and a molecule there and you’ve got yourself a ‘legal high’ – some kind of pill (advertised as not for human consumption but ‘for promoting healthy plant leaf shine’) which will send you completely wild for about a day and a half. Which is probably overdoing it if you have a schedule like mine.
Here is a truth so obvious that people fail to notice it: precisely the same substances may, in fact usually do, have entirely different effects on different people. We see this clearly with allergies: Person A can down a bag of peanuts in one and then, with a satisfied eructation, ask for more, while Person B is on the floor choking to death with anaphylaxis because he took a bite out of an apple that grew on a tree near a factory which ten years previously used nuts in its food processing plant.
We are used to it with alcohol too: we can sit at a table and match a friend glass for glass until that moment, that ghastly moment, mortifying for all, when the friend’s eyes will snap down like shutters, he or she will start arguing with the waiters, they will start to repeat themselves, get spoiling for a fight and generally become a foul and unspeakable embarrassment everyone is anxious to be as far away from as possible. They will have had exactly, to the sixteenth of an ounce, the same amount of alcohol in their body as you have, yet you are capable of walking in a straight line, reciting ‘Ozymandias’, doing the crossword and drinking another four glasses without feeling anything more than a little merry. The number of times I have had to tell friends of mine who have had trouble with the bottle that they just must face up to the fact that they are, unfair as it seems, to all intents and purposes, allergic to it … you can’t even make a rule out of body size. I have had huge friends who just can’t take a drink, and have known dainty girls who can drink continuously without showing any sign of instability, aggression or wobble.
I am very lucky, or perhaps unlucky, in that I have a high tolerance for alcohol myself. Sometimes I’ve been known to mix it with an injudicious pill and found myself in bed the next morning without the faintest recollection of how I got there or how the whole evening panned out.
Another characteristic that I must be really clear and straightforward about is that I hate parties. I absolutely detest them. I
don’t think I have ever liked a person as much as I have hated a party. The moment I am there I want to leave. I discount meals around a dinner table in a private house or restaurant. But parties with music, with people standing up, parties with music, parties with buffets or canapé waiters, parties with music, bring-a-bottle parties, parties with music, poolside parties … did I mention music? There’s a famous speech in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies, which I lifted almost whole for a screen adaptation I made in about 2002. ‘Oh, Nina, such a lot of parties … all that succession and repetition of humanity. All those vile bodies.’ Waugh was a rude snob, a bully and a rascal, but he wrote like an angel, and he and I (or at least I and Adam Fenwick-Symes, his hero) are as one when it comes to parties.
In the gay community, to which I did not belong, despite the sexual visa issued to me at birth which told the world that I was a citizen, musical comings-together were the least squalid form of finding a partner for the night and – who knows? – for the long term. These comings-together were in gay bars that pumped out Donna Summer, Blondie and the Eurythmics or in places like Heaven, down behind Charing Cross, which was supposedly the largest disco in Europe. I went to Heaven precisely once and found it hell. The noise, those awful up-and-down raking inspections that greeted you wherever you went. I knew that I fell short of the ideal, which in those days seemed to involve string vests or plaid shirts, moustaches, jeans and plenty of muscle. The clone look, as it was known on account of its duplicated prevalence.