Humboldt and his traveling companion, Aimé Bonpland, safely crossed the Atlantic Ocean and landed in Venezuela. The two men forged ahead on foot and horseback, by boat and dugout canoe, across the plains of Venezuela, along the length of the Orinoco River, the waterway Christopher Columbus thought led to paradise, up into the Andes Mountains, and down trails, passes, and valleys that stretched into Bogotá, Quito, and Lima. From there they crossed the Columbian isthmus and sailed to Mexico, Cuba, and the United States before finally returning to Europe in August 1804.
The German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt in 1840, at age seventy-one, forty-one years after making his famous journey to the New World. (photo credit 3.2)
Along this dangerous journey, Humboldt meticulously described his observations in dozens of field notebooks, published under the title Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent. The work became one of the most popular travelogues of the nineteenth century. On its pages appear a comprehensive account of South America’s climate, geology, geography, botany, zoology, political economy, and anthropology, guaranteeing Humboldt a reputation as an adventurer and scholar that, unlike those of many who preceded him, remains intact more than two centuries after the expedition ended.
In 1801, while tramping through the mountainous terrain of Peru, Humboldt was introduced to the buzzy sensations brought on by chewing coca leaves. He was impressed, to say the least, writing, “It is well known that Indian messengers take no other aliment for whole days than lime and coca; both excite the secretion of saliva and gastric juice; they take away the appetite, without affording any nourishment to the body.” Parenthetically, Humboldt erroneously hypothesized that the secret ingredient of this concoction was an alkaline ash, or lime, called llipta that the natives chewed with the leaves, rather than the leaves themselves.
The author William H. Prescott, c. 1840. (photo credit 3.3)
Before long Humboldt’s fascination with coca leaves was echoed by several other explorers who followed in his path and described how the leaves gave the Indians who chewed them superhuman powers of endurance and strength. As a result of such fantastic reports, coca was heralded across the popular press of the day. For example, an 1817 article published in the Gentleman’s Magazine, a periodical read in London’s finest clubs, breathlessly declared, “[The Indians] masticate Coca and undergo the greatest fatigue without any injury to health or bodily vigor. They want neither butcher nor baker, nor brewer, nor distiller, nor fuel, nor culinary utensils.” The article went on to exhort Sir Humphrey Davy, England’s greatest chemist, to drop everything and figure out the plant’s secret, urging, “it would be the greatest achievement—whatever a London alderman might think—ever attained by human wisdom.” Davy, unimpressed, stuck to his own research, elucidating the chemistry of several elements of the periodic table as well as the anesthetic properties of nitrous oxide, or laughing gas.
THE CURIOSITY ABOUT COCA among well-read Europeans and North Americans of the early nineteenth century was further advanced by one of the oddest historians ever to practice that bookish craft. He was a Boston Brahmin and Harvard graduate named William Hickling Prescott, whose work Sigmund likely read with great pleasure. One winter evening while still an undergraduate at Harvard, Prescott made his way across the Yard after eating dinner in the Commons with his school chums. College boys being college boys, a snowball fight soon ensued. A few of the students secreted out some stale bread from the dining room and buried the crusts in the snowballs about to become airborne. As Prescott turned his head to observe the commotion that accompanied this early-nineteenth-century version of a frosty food fight, he was struck in the left eye. So severe was the injury that he lost most of his vision on that side. A few years later, he developed an acute inflammation of his right eye and rheumatism, leaving him severely visually impaired and with debilitating joint pain for the remainder of his life.
Prescott’s physical deficits forced him to give up his legal studies and dreams of joining his father’s law firm. Instead, he retreated into the cloistered life of a writer focusing upon the storied past of Spain and its vast empire. Using his well-connected friends to gather bibliographic materials from the leading libraries of the world, along with the travel notes of those better equipped to see, explore, and characterize what he could not, Prescott produced a series of bulky tomes. He became a best-selling author in 1837 with a magisterial account of the reign of Spain’s Ferdinand and Isabella. From there, he turned to writing a two-volume history of the conquests of Mexico and Peru, each of which surpassed his previous work in terms of sales and prestige when published in 1847.
Incredibly, this man, who made only occasional trips to London and the Continent, never actually visited the regions he wrote about so penetratingly for his legion of readers. Physical and geographical disabilities aside, Prescott managed to describe the climate, terrain, and culture of Peru in copious detail. He was particularly clear in stressing the brawny appeal coca leaves held for the coqueros:
Even food the most invigorating is less grateful to him than his beloved narcotic. Under the Incas, it is said to have been exclusively reserved for the noble orders. If so, the people gained one luxury by the Conquest; and after that period, it was so extensively used by them, that this article constituted a most important colonial item of revenue of Spain.
Remarkably for so early in the history of Western civilization’s awareness of coca, Prescott admonished, “Yet, with the soothing charms of an opiate, this weed so much vaunted by the natives, when used to excess, is said to be attended with all the mischievous effects of habitual intoxication.” Unfortunately, few who embarked on studying coca in the 1880s, including Freud and Halsted, paid much attention to Prescott’s prescient warning on the leaves’ addictive powers.
SOME MIND-ALTERING AGENTS, such as marijuana and tobacco, need little more processing than desiccation before they are ready to be consumed, although someone, at some point, had to figure out that the effects of these particular substances were best felt when smoked. But unleashing the active, and most potent, aspects of the coca leaf for use as a medication and, later, as a drug of abuse was hardly an accident. It was the result of an exhaustive search engaging some of the best scientists, chemists, and physicians of the nineteenth century. All of these men—and not a few of the consumers of coca leaves who commissioned their research—were eager to discover just what miraculous substance was locked into these leaves that produced an endurance, confidence, and alertness so sublimely gratifying. More to the point, they wanted to know how that active ingredient could be harnessed into a profitable, life-saving—or at least life-enhancing—agent for the chronically depressed, fatigued, and inactive, as well as for a multitude of people simply seeking an extra lift.
Before such a vexing chemical equation could be solved, the first order of business was to address the enormous difficulty of shipping coca leaves around the world. The state of travel in the early to mid-nineteenth century made it all but impossible to successfully bring load after load of fresh coca leaves to Europe and North America. Transportation of coca leaves began in the treacherous, mountainous terrain of Peru and Colombia, and most mules could carry only a few bales of leaves at a time; these were subsequently hand-carried by intrepid hikers through the jungle and valleys, to the port towns. In later decades, railroad cars and riverboats were employed, but even with these innovations exporting cuca remained an arduous, dangerous, and expensive proposition. Making matters of importation even more complicated, the coca leaves tended to become stale and dried out on the long voyages back to Europe, and as the plants shriveled, so, too, did their vaunted powers. Worse, if the leaves became wet en route (a definite risk), they rotted and spoiled.
Beyond the limited supply of coca leaves, however, there remained the task of figuring out how to identify, extract, and mass-produce the active ingredient of the coca leaf—a process that took several decades. During much of the 1850s, chemists on both si
des of the Atlantic played with alcohol solutions of coca leaves, dried residues of coca teas, and other means of extraction, with modest success.
In 1857, at the height of this interest in coca, the prominent German chemist Friedrich Wöhler contacted Carl Scherzer, a scientist assigned to the Austrian emperor Franz Josef’s exploration frigate, the Novara. Wöhler convinced Scherzer to locate a large supply of coca leaves during his next voyage and bring them back to the empire. If Scherzer brought enough coca back to Europe, Wöhler was certain, he and his colleagues would figure out the secret of the leaves.
When Scherzer returned in 1859, an overjoyed Wöhler signed for the receipt of a large trunk of coca. In true professorial fashion, he assigned his most able graduate student at the University of Göttingen, Albert Niemann, to work up the coca leaf assignment and figure it out. Toiling over a carefully preserved thirty-pound stash of coca leaves, the largest intact shipment of coca ever to reach European shores, Niemann produced a seminal doctoral dissertation in 1860, entitled On a New Organic Base in the Coca Leaves. Among the many pages of complex formulas and laboratory methods, Niemann describes how he solved the holy grail of converting coca leaves into the highly purified coca alkaloid. Sadly, Dr. Niemann died at age twenty-six, a year after the Göttingen faculty approved his dissertation, constituting an especially odd case of publishing and then perishing. Nevertheless, Niemann’s chemical inquiries became the basis of deriving the addictive cocaine alkaloid crystals from coca leaves. By the close of the nineteenth century, these chemical methods would be further refined and exploited in a more profitable manner.
Angelo Mariani, creator and masterful marketer of Vin Mariani, c. 1890. (photo credit 3.4)
MOST THRILL-SEEKING EUROPEANS of the late 1850s and early 1860s found chewing on coca leaves to be déclassé, if not disgusting. As a result, infusions, or teas, of coca leaves and, later, other liquid preparations became a popular means of consuming the drug in cafés and dining establishments. The credit for introducing this fashionable craze to Western consumers belongs largely to a French chemist named Angelo Mariani, originally from Corsica, who hailed from a long line of physicians and chemists. From 1863 until well into the 1900s, Mariani and his associates concocted, manufactured, and distributed the second-most-popular coca-based beverage in human history.
A bottle of Vin Mariani. (photo credit 3.5)
In 1892, Mariani wrote a charming memoir of coca leaves as he supervised his well-stocked and bustling laboratory high above Haussmann Boulevard in Paris. In it, he credits a scientific publication entitled On the Hygienic and Medicinal Virtues of Coca. Even when reading this pamphlet nearly a century and a half later, one sees immediately why it proved to be so perversely inspirational. The report was written “with great difficulty” in 1859 by the eminent Italian neurologist Paolo Mantegazza, after a trip to Peru. Using himself as a subject, the neurologist describes a series of wild drug-induced experiences; most prominent is the phantasmagoria induced by consuming a walloping fifty-four grams of coca: “I sneered at all the poor mortals condemned to live in the valley of tears while I, carried on the wings of two leaves of coca, went flying though the spaces of 77,438 worlds, each more splendid than the one before.”
Armed with his own considerable powers of verbal expression, and years of self-experimentation with coca, Monsieur Mariani recorded his own romantic account on the human propensity to indulge in mind-altering substances:
Each race has its fashions and fancies. The Indian munches the betel; the Chinaman woos with passion the brutalizing intoxication of opium; the European occupies his idle hours or employs his leisure ones in smoking, chewing or snuffing tobacco. Guided by a happier instinct, the native of South America has adopted Coca. When young, he robs his father of it; later on, he devotes his first savings to its purchase. Without it he would fear vertigo on the summit of the Andes, and weaken at his severe labor in the mines. It is with him everywhere; even in his sleep he keeps his precious quid in his mouth. But should Coca be regarded merely as masticatory? And must we accept as irrevocable the decision of certain therapeutists: “Cocaine, worthless; coca, superfluous drug”?
Undaunted neither by pooh-poohing medical experts nor by the difficulties of chemical production, Mariani worked day and night to manufacture palatable coca-laced beverages. His great eureka moment arrived when he mixed ground coca leaves with a far more traditional French intoxicant, Bordeaux wine. Through careful experimentation and measurement, the chemist realized that the alcohol in the red wine acted to unleash the power of the coca leaves. In the decades that followed, scientists discovered that when alcohol and cocaine are combined a new, even more intoxicating compound, called cocaethlyene, is formed in the liver. After months of research and quality control, Mariani could guarantee his customers that each fluid ounce of his wine contained precisely 6 milligrams of cocaine, with the exception of those bottles exported to the United States, which were moderately more powerful at 7.2 milligrams of cocaine per ounce of wine. Angelo called his elixir Vin Mariani and, not surprisingly for a beverage that contains two very addictive components, it soon became enormously popular. In later years, he came out with a wide menu of coca-containing products, including Mariani teas, Mariani throat lozenges, Mariani cigars and cigarettes, and even Mariani margarine.
Mariani ingeniously approached several leading Parisian ear, nose, and throat doctors in search of soothing tonics to prescribe for their patients suffering from postnasal drip and sore throats. Product in hand, the Corsican provided them with complimentary samples of his bottled coca elixirs. In so doing, Mariani predated by more than a century and a half the unholy alliance of pharmaceutical houses and too many practicing doctors, a partnership that continues to conspire, inundate, and overmedicate us all in the twenty-first century.
Ever the savvy medicinal magnate, Mariani extolled his product to the general public in colorful advertisements and pamphlets. “It nourishes, fortifies, refreshes, aids digestion, strengthens the system,” the advertisements declared; “it is unequaled as a tonic, it is a stimulant for the fatigued and over worked body and brain, it prevents malaria, influenza and wasting diseases.” Well, perhaps he oversold it a bit.
Legend has it that one of Mariani’s first important customers was a neurasthenic Parisian actress. She became so enamored with the drink that every evening as she took her curtain call, she crossed the footlights and told her audiences about the muse behind her spectacular performances.
Appreciation of the beverage apparently crossed religious boundaries as well. During the late 1880s, the grand rabbi of France, Zadoc Kahn, announced, “My conversion is complete. Praise be to Mariani’s wine.” Around the same time, Pope Leo XIII awarded the Mariani Company a special Vatican gold medal, allowed his face and name to be featured on a Vin Mariani advertisement, and was said to have carried around, under his cassock, a flask filled with the wine that was, “like the widow’s cruse, never empty.”
World leaders, too, loved the drink. For example, in 1885, former president Ulysses S. Grant was suffering from the end stages of throat cancer (itself likely caused by an unhealthy devotion to alcohol and tobacco) and eking out the last chapters of his autobiography for Mark Twain’s ill-fated publishing house. It became a book many historians laud as one of the best memoirs ever penned by an ex-president. Yet even as he scribbled down his thoughts about the Civil War, Grant was swilling bottle after bottle of Mariani’s wine. By the close of the nineteenth century, Queen Victoria, the shah of Persia, and President William McKinley had publicly declared their appreciation for Mariani’s cocaine-enhanced tonic.
An advertisement for Vin Mariani featuring the French playwright Victorien Sardou, c. 1890s. Freud saw Sarah Bernhardt in one of Sardou’s plays in 1886. (photo credit 3.6)
An advertising poster for Vin Mariani, c. 1890s. (photo credit 3.7)
Mariani further exhibited his flair for marketing by sending cases of coca wine to celebrities around the globe, requesting in retur
n only a note expressing their thoughts on the product and an autographed picture. In the years to come, he published these celebrity endorsements in a series of albums called Portraits from Album Mariani, featuring some of the most prominent figures of the era. Thomas A. Edison, Auguste Rodin, Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henrik Ibsen, Émile Zola, Alexandre Dumas, and H. G. Wells, among others, all wrote exuberant letters about the product to their dealer, Angelo Mariani. These glowing encomiums were also prominently featured in the lush advertising materials the Mariani Company distributed throughout Europe and the United States. Such positive buzz, undoubtedly, helped to make Angelo the world’s first cocaine millionaire.
MARIANI WAS HARDLY ALONE in the mass production of popular coca products during this era. Nor was he to be accorded the claim of the number one producer of cocaine-containing drinks. In fact, an even more popular version still exists (albeit in a slightly different form, sans cocaine): the ever-popular Coca-Cola, which in its original concoction was much like Vin Mariani but employed cola syrup and soda water instead of alcohol. This now ubiquitous beverage, with its biting bubbles and refreshing taste, was originally marketed as a tonic guaranteed to energize those who pulled long swigs from its bottles.
Like many men who fought in the Civil War, John Stith Pemberton was injured on the battlefield and, in search of relief from excruciating pain, became a morphine addict. Not surprisingly, he was intrigued by medical reports in the early 1880s that cocaine might be a cure for morphinism. A pharmacist and patent medicine manufacturer, he was always on the lookout for profitable drugs to sell and began producing a product similar in composition to Vin Mariani, only he called it “French Wine Coca, the ideal tonic and stimulant.”
An Anatomy of Addiction Page 6