Victorian-Era Drug Culture Was Wild, Man…
No cap, Coke Ennyday was my self-given nickname for a while back…
When most people think of the Victorian Era, they tend to assume everything was squeaky clean. They assume people were all prim and proper, that sobriety was a thing, and that people just died from disease and poisons they used everyday.
Most of this is a fairly correct assumption, minus the drug use. Prior to 1914, cocaine and many other drugs were perfectly legal. In fact, they were often used as over-the-counter remedies for everything from sore throats to weight loss.
(To be fair, cocaine can be a wonderful weight loss drug…until you realize you look like shit and can’t stop eating when you’re not on it. Ask me how I know.)
Whenever there are drugs that can get you feeling a little loopy, there will be a culture around it. This is what brings me to this topic today: taking a look at Victorian Era drug culture.
Drug humor, as it turns out, is way older than the Summer of Love.
Behold, one of my favorite weird movies of all time: The Mystery of the Leaping Fish, published in 1916. This movie follows a “scientific detective” by the name of Coke Ennyday as he solves a mystery and gets so high he flies through a ceiling.
No, literally. That’s the boss battle. He gets so strung out he jumps through a ceiling. Somehow, that made sense. (Yes, I’m pretty sure drugs may have been involved in the making of this film.)
In it, there are a lot of bizarre scenes that most people would never see coming, including:
The detective happily shooting up coke (or laudanum), giggling, and twirling his mustache. Today, this would likely be panned as encouraging addiction.
A clock that says “EATS, SLEEP, DOPE, DRINKS.” Just saying, this would make an incredible gift in my opinion. For real, I want a clock like this and I haven’t used opioids or coke in years.
All. The. Cocaine. On. That. Table. Dude. That made me want to grind my teeth when I first saw this film all those years ago.
The boss battle gets won by injecting the bad guys with drugs until they’re as high as Coke Ennyday. To be fair, that would probably kill most people, so I guess it would solve a bad guy problem.
I can’t help but smile a little bit seeing this film. I mean, there’s something totally hokey about it — and yet, as a person who was part of drug culture for so long, there is a certain humor around it that’s totally unmistakable and timeless to that culture.
People often forget how common addiction used to be in this era — and how destigmatized drugs were.
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