The First South Asian cocaine market, 1885–1899

The name of cocaine’s first consumer in India was Ram Sahaye. He was a thirty-year old shepherd by caste and lived near Indore in central India. His first experience of the substance came on New Year’s Eve 1884 and followed an injection of morphine. It was “muriate of cocaine,” or cocaine chloride, that he took on two occasions, and the dose was doubled the second time on New Year’s Day 1885. The episode did not end well, “whilst TALKING [sic], a deadly hue came over his countenance; he lost consciousness, the heart’s action failed, and he suddenly expired.”Footnote ⁶

Ram Sahaye was certainly India’s first recorded consumer of cocaine, as he is named in an article written by Surgeon-Major Denis Keegan, the Residency Surgeon at Indore, and published in the Indian Medical Gazette (IMG) in March 1885. Keegan was an experienced Indian Medical Service (IMS) officer, having joined as an Assistant-Surgeon in 1866 and risen steadily through the ranks. He would go on to establish himself as a pioneer in plastic surgery,Footnote ⁷ and this article certainly established him as one of the first in India to test cocaine’s medical potential. Ram Sahaye was a patient who had entered Indore Charitable Hospital where Keegan was in charge. The unfortunate shepherd exhibited all the signs of rabies, spasms, pains in his chest and abdomen, and an inability to swallow. The Surgeon treated him immediately upon arrival with enemas and morphine injections but these had little effect. Only the new drug seemed to have an impact on the patient’s suffering;

In other words, applying the cocaine chloride in solution directly to the inside of the throat had anaesthetized it to the extent that the ability to swallow returned to the patient. Clearly he worked this out very quickly, as Keegan reported that following this first taste of the substance Ram Sahaye “sternly refused to even make an attempt at swallowing until after the Cocaine had been applied to the back of his throat.” Once this was done again he managed to drink the fluids presented to him, and “He said he could go on drinking milk the whole day.” Sadly, it was while embellishing this point that the “deadly hue” came across his face and he died on the spot.

Surgeon-Major Keegan did not limit his curiosity about cocaine to cases of rabies however, and at the end of his article about Ram Sahaye he noted the other surgery in which he had tried it. Writing early in February 1885, he stated that since 31 December he had incorporated it into twenty operations on the eye with great success;

The last two words of his statement draw attention to the wider context for Keegan’s work with the substance. It seems from the above that he began work with cocaine on the last day of 1884 and had used it on at least twenty-one occasions in the first five weeks of 1885. This places him squarely in the early stages of the deployment of the drug in Western medicine as a whole. Historians have argued that it was the presentation in 1884 of Carl Koller’s research with it that launched cocaine’s sudden rise to status of “wonder-drug” in the late nineteenth-century. He noticed its effects on the eye and first reported them to the Heidelberg Ophthalmological Society on September 19, 1884. However, news of Koller’s research was first published by a Dr Henry Noyes only in October 1884, in a summary for the New York Medical Record.Footnote ¹⁰ The news would spread rapidly because of its implications; this use of cocaine established it as the first modern local anaesthetic. Improvements in industrial processes also meant that larger quantities of the substance suddenly became more available than ever before at much the same time, and that prices began to drop to levels where more and more medical men could get their hands on it. Medical journals around the world in 1885 quickly found themselves publishing article after article on cocaine, which had rarely merited a mention before that date.Footnote ¹¹ This was certainly true in India where another half a dozen articles on the substance appeared in the IMG over the two years following the first by Keegan.

But cocaine was also appearing in other publications. The reader of page twelve of The Pioneer on 1 December 1886 was unlikely to be looking for cocaine. Divided into four columns, it was dominated by advertisements for travel services. There were only three advertisements in the “Addresses” section on the page, and two were for dentists. One simply stated “Mr Beer, L.D.S., DENTAL SURGEON, MEERUT” while the other made more of an effort to entice the customer;

At first sight the advertisement seems underwhelming, but it provides an important glimpse of Western medicine outside of the healthcare system established by the colonial government. The IMG articles mentioned above were all written by medical men employed by the IMS and therefore paid by the Government of India. They were all employees of the empire working in its institutions. On the other hand, the Stephens Brothers appear to have been private practitioners operating a commercial dentistry firm with branches dotted around Delhi. This short entry on the classified ads page of The Pioneer showed that cocaine was quickly in use beyond the walls of the hospitals and clinics of the colonial state too.Footnote ¹³

Cocaine for sale

The above episodes raise the question of where doctors in India were getting their hands on cocaine, and how they were able to source supplies so early in the story of the global cocaine boom. In the same edition of the IMG in which Keegan’s article was published another piece made it clear that medical men there had turned to the commercial sector, rather than a colonial institution, for their supplies. In March 1885 Surgeon-Major George Ross revealed that cocaine was already being retailed in India. He reported that “I obtained some Muriate of Cocaine from Messrs. Treacher, Bombay, a few days ago” and added that “the drug is now available in Calcutta and Bombay, its price being Rs. 2 per grain.”Footnote ¹⁴ Perhaps this should be no surprise given that Messrs. Treacher and Co. was a long-established “chemists” in Bombay which had been listed in the city as far back as 1858.Footnote ¹⁵

Attention was also being drawn to cocaine’s availability in the back pages of the IMG. By the mid-1880s a copy of the periodical would include ten pages of advertisements, about a quarter of any edition. Reading through these provides a glimpse of the wheeling and dealing, and the speculations and gambles, of those trying to make money out of the market for Western medical products that was growing in India.Footnote ¹⁶ In April 1885, Smith, Stanistreet, and Company (SSCo) advertised to announce the arrival of new stock, and there on the list of items now available for the first time was “Cocaine, Cocaine Hydrochlorate, Citrate, and Salicylate.” Furthermore, there was the note that “Solutions used for Local Anaesthesia” which included cocaine could now be purchased.Footnote ¹⁷ Clearly the hubbub that had been developing around cocaine in medical circles in India, which was captured in the front pages of the journal, had not been missed by the colony’s second oldest stockist of pharmaceutical products. They had been quick to secure supplies and were evidently keen to make customers aware of this. The same advertisement appeared in each monthly edition for the rest of the year.

Another product found itself advertised in the back-pages of the journal that year which would have been useful to the aspiring cocaine-doctor in India. Cocaine and its use in Ophthalmology and General Surgery by Hermann Knapp was on sale at Thacker, Spink and Co. in Calcutta, the leading publisher and bookseller in all of India at that time.Footnote ¹⁸ This volume was the first English language translation of Carl Koller’s original paper presented in Germany back in September 1884, together with observations and instructions added by the author. Knapp was an eye-specialist and Professor of the New York University Medical College at the time, with a career that stretched back to the 1850s and which included a stint as Professor of Ophthalmology at Heidelberg and the foundation of the New York Ophthalmic and Aural Institute.Footnote ¹⁹ Clearly, in October 1885, this was the key publication in the English language for anyone tempted to try out cocaine as a local anaesthetic.

But there was another entry on the same list of medical books for sale at the bookshop that would have been just as important, the third edition of Martindale and Westcott’s Extra Pharmacopoeia; or Unofficial Drugs and Chemical and Pharmaceutical Preparations produced in 1884. It must have been published late in that year because it came, as the advertisement made plain, “With a Supplement on Cocaine and its Salts.”Footnote ²⁰ This addition had clearly been hastily penned to take advantage of the sudden interest in the product, but it was certainly thorough. It acknowledged Koller’s work and the paper of September 1884, and gathered together evidence from articles published by The Lancet and the New York Medical Record in November of that year, adding a single citation from the British Journal of Dental Science.Footnote ²¹

All of this is important as it shows that the medical men of British India were right up to date with developments back in Europe and the US when it came to the sudden appearance of cocaine in western medicine. Both the substance itself in its multiple forms, and the freshest information about it, flowed through international networks in which those working in India were an integral part during 1885. These networks were powered by the need to disseminate, and to search for, the most recent ideas and therapies during a period of constant scientific change at the end of the nineteenth-century. But tangled up in this were commercial interests and enterprises, which made their money from buying and selling the new substances, and also the latest ideas and information about them.

A sketch that appeared in the IMG in December 1888 pointed to a new mode of taking cocaine, and hints at a shift beyond its strictly medical deployment.Footnote ²²

Figure 1.

Extract from a Burroughs, Wellcome and Co. advertisement, “The Throat and Voice,” in The Indian Medical Gazette Advertiser, December 1888, p. iv.

While the advertisement stands out because of its picture of the product, the “voice-tabloid” had in fact been gaining momentum in the marketing of the Burroughs, Wellcome Company (B.W. & Co.) since 1886. In June of that year SSCo took out a half page advert to focus attention on just six products, one of which was “COCAINE TABLETS” which were recommended as “an efficient Remedy for Sea-Sickness, Throat Irritation etc.”Footnote ²³ This remained a feature of their advertising until the end of the year, when the company ceased taking space in the journal. In November of that year, however, B.W. & Co. included “Voice Tabloids (Cocaine, Chlorate of Potash and Borax)” in its list of “NEW PRODUCTS” that it had brought to market.Footnote ²⁴ The voice-tabloids continued to feature in the quarter-page “New Products” advertisement until April 1887. In the edition that month the company gave an article-style treatment to the tablets for the first time.Footnote ²⁵ The headline was “VOICE AND THROAT, NEW METHODS OF TREATMENT” and the subheading read “Pharmaceutical Improvements.” A number of products were listed, and various expert voices quoted enthusiastically endorsing their effectiveness, and even their appearance; “The Wyeth Tablets are manufactured with the utmost neatness and perfection” was attributed to the British Medical Journal. “VOICE TABLOIDS” were described as follows;

The tension between medical therapy and performance enhancement hums throughout the text, as on the one hand the promise of the substance lies in easing the pain of a medical condition, while on the other it can be found in a more pleasant speaking voice. In its potential to tackle “clergyman’s throat” it also covers the ground in between the two, in restoring to good order the voice of those who have strained it through overuse. The substance was being advertised as having medical, quasi-medical, and barely medical applications. By December 1888 the tidy sketch (above) had appeared at the core of the advertisement for the “Voice Tabloids” and most of the text had gone. The emphasis this time was on the production of a “silvery tone” in the voice of the speaker; performance enhancement seems to have become the dominant theme in the company’s approach to selling its product by this point. Within four years of the first appearance of cocaine in South Asia, pharmaceutical manufacturers and suppliers in Britain were thinking about how to extend markets for it in India beyond those who needed some for strictly surgical or medical purposes.Footnote ²⁷

The South Asian cocaine market, 1899–1911

The final volume of the IMG of the nineteenth century signalled what lay ahead for cocaine in South Asia. The first of two mentions of cocaine was a brief note reproduced from a German medical journal on the use of a solution of the substance dabbed onto wasp-stings, and the instant relief that this effected.Footnote ²⁸ However, the second was more significant. In a lengthy editorial about the Government of Bengal’s proposed Sale of Poisons Act, the journal included the following footnote;

The substance was no longer being sold simply by drugs companies and their agents, or sourced by government agencies for colonial hospitals in India. Nor were customers for cocaine there limited to those seeking pain-relief. This was the first glimpse of a new market for the drug and a novel network of suppliers keen to meet their needs. This market and that network would trouble the authorities in south Asia for the next forty years.

In a paper focused on the links between the West and South Asia that brought cocaine to India in this period there is little space to dwell on the consumers who bought the substance. This is discussed elsewhere in more detail.Footnote ³⁰ However, it is worth mentioning here the unusual nature of their taste for it. From the turn of the twentieth century until the 1940s Indian consumers persisted in taking cocaine orally. It was incorporated into paan, the popular Indian refreshment in which a number of leaves from the betel creeper are smeared with various ingredients and then folded into triangular shaped Bidas or parcels. The content of each paan is different according to the tastes and inclinations of the consumer who directs the vendor or paan-wallah in the construction of the purchase. This is then popped into the mouth and chewed, with some of the saliva-juice swallowed, while most of the contents are spat out following mastication. Common ingredients include areca nut, catechu (from the heart wood of the katha tree), and betel-oil, and the overall effect is to refresh the palate, flavour the breath and provide stimulation.Footnote ³¹ This oral administration of cocaine was highly unusual during these decades when placed in comparative context. In Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere in Asia, cocaine was either sniffed up the nose or injected intravenously.Footnote ³²

The cocaine for incorporation in these paan parcels was certainly not coming from India itself. Other historians of cocaine such as Steven Karch have noted that there were brief efforts to establish the coca plant as a commercial crop within British colonies in both India and Ceylon at the end of the nineteenth century. In fact, experiments with cultivation dated back to the 1870s and continued sporadically until the 1890s. They proved to be promising, and by the late 1880s the Royal Botanic Garden outside of London had established that of all the efforts around the empire to grow the plant as a source of marketable cocaine, those based in Darjeeling and in Ceylon were most likely to be successful. However, the colonial administrations in both places failed to pursue the matter, as neither could see clear economic benefits. They shared the view that South American producers were so far ahead of them in industrial investment and in building commercial networks that efforts to muscle in on the business would prove costly and the risk of failure was high. The Dutch made the opposite decision in the 1890s and went on to dominate world cocaine supply from its Asian colony in Java early in the twentieth century.Footnote ³³

It is necessary to look instead to Europe, and in particular to Germany, for the source of the cocaine that began to arrive in India at the end of the 1890s. Of course, the German pharmaceutical industry at this time dominated world production of the substance, largely through the efforts of Merck and Co of Darmstadt. It would be no surprise therefore to find out that the cocaine in India had its origins there as so much of it was produced by that company. The remaining part of this paper will argue that Merck’s cocaine did not arrive in South Asia by happenstance, however. In fact, the company actively cultivated a market in India, to the point where it flouted colonial control efforts, and ended up forcing cocaine into the emerging international drugs regulatory system.

Merck in India

The German pharmaceutical industry had been eyeing the South Asian market since at least the 1890s. For example, an enthusiastic article first published in the Pharmaceutische Zeitung of Berlin on the 4 November 1892 by a “H. Helling, London” extolled the opportunities available in British India. It reported that “there is an opportunity for many a German chemist and druggist or manufacturer to work out new enterprises in the country and draw out profits.” The article then provided hints and tips on how to work effectively in India, and particularly Bombay. The advice included making contact with certain communities there, “the Parsee or emigrant followers of Zoroaster take the first place as far as mercantile efficiency is concerned and are on a par with the Europeans,” and finding customers “in the bazars everything is classified according to the different guilds; that is, we find the different branches of business together and the poison shops form a street for themselves.” As for the products to be supplied to the market,

That mention of cocaine made it one of the few products specifically referred to by name in the article. While it is difficult to say with any certainty that they specifically acted on Helling’s advice in the Pharmaceutische Zeitung, it was certainly the case that German companies began to target India in the years following its publication. In 1896 the first wholly owned subsidiary of Bayer in Asia, “Farbenfabriken Bayer and Co. Ltd.” was established, and it was actively importing Bayer’s pharmaceutical products as early as 1898. Chief among them was the company’s flagship product, heroin.Footnote ³⁵ It is their German rivals, Merck and Co., which can be directly linked to sales of cocaine in India however. The firm had been producing cocaine in Europe since the 1880s,Footnote ³⁶ and their annual report (Jahresbericht) for 1903/4 included a review of their Asian strategy since the turn of the century. In this recap they noted that back in 1900 they had sent one of their agents, a Mister Göhner, to scope out the market and to make the necessary contacts to establish a sales network there. He had clearly been a busy man, as the annual report cheerfully reported:

This summary provides important insights into the methods used by Merck to build markets in South Asia for their products early in the twentieth century. The agent named above was in fact J.A. Kirkbride & Co., a firm with shops in Bombay and in Madras which dealt in general stores rather than specifically in pharmaceutical products. Its advertisements in this period included those for bicycles, binoculars and petrol-fired lamps, and the company was to come to the attention of the authorities in India for its dealings in cocaine in 1904.Footnote ³⁸ “Professor Gajjar” seems to have evaded such attention, as he is not mentioned in official reporting at this time. However, he was clearly regarded as very important to Merck’s operations as his partnership was celebrated as guaranteeing success. Gajjar certainly benefited from the relationship. He set up his own druggist company in 1905, and by the end of the decade had established his firm as Merck’s largest single customer (for legitimate products) in South Asia.Footnote ³⁹ Clearly, Kirkbride and Gajjar were the contacts that the German company needed in order to access Indian markets. The former operated across India and was experienced in finding markets for all manner of Western goods. The latter seemed particularly important as it was thought that his opinion carried significant weight, that it was widely reported in local language publications, that he was prepared to actively encourage others to use it, and that he could even smooth over difficulties with local excise enforcement.

The annual report for 1904/5 shows that, having achieved sales of cocaine in South Asia the company was keen to maintain them, although now it found itself doing so in the face of new regulations. The account of corporate activities in that period started breezily enough, “turnover increased, foremost because of major sales of cocaine, with more than 60,000 Reichsmark” but admitted that “Unfortunately, the Indian government has also implemented restrictions for the import of cocaine in the last open Presidencies of Madras and Rangoon, which will soon be followed by import prohibitions.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Given that the turnover was equivalent to around £2,930 at the time or about a quarter of a million pounds in today’s money, this seemed particularly unfortunate.Footnote ⁴¹

The clouds of regulation had in fact been gathering since 1900. The British empire in India was divided into a number of administrative regions one of which, Bengal, had imposed controls on cocaine in its territory in 1900 aimed at restricting its use to strictly medical purposes. Other regions followed suit, Bombay and Burma in 1903, Madras in 1905 and the United Provinces and the Punjab in 1906 before the Government of India stepped in during 1906 and required all regions to adopt controls. They did this throughout 1906 and 1907, and the Government of India also began to lean on the so-called princely states, which were controlled by the British through local puppet-rulers, to follow suit, which most did in 1907 and 1908.Footnote ⁴²

The 1904/5 Merck annual report was much more than a lament however, as it also reveals that the company and its representatives on the ground were proactive in maintaining cocaine revenues in the face of this growing control regime. It went on to state that;

It is worth dwelling on this brief summary for what it reveals. The report clearly shows that senior Merck staff had been looking into ways of evading regulations and had worked out that sending packages to India through the UK, rather than directly from Germany, was most likely to maintain supply as shipments on that route were “less strictly controlled.” It also shows that despite price declines the Merck agent in Calcutta was keen to secure increased amounts of the product. Presumably he was confident he could sell it at a decent enough margin to make it worth his while, even though he was in Bengal where it was to be sold strictly for medical purposes. The report also shows that in Madras there were newcomers to the trade keen to access the product and who were sure that they could drive up sales even though they too were based in a Presidency where the authorities were in the process of imposing similar restrictions on cocaine consumption. The “satisfying developments” in Rangoon would certainly have been made with a disregard for the regulations which had been in place since 1903, and in Karachi they were most likely linked to the as yet unregulated market conditions in the Punjab. Overall, the tone of the 1904 report was clear. Merck executives were devising strategies to get around or to defy the regulatory frameworks for controlling cocaine imports being put in place by the British. They were not simply ignoring the spirit of these controls by sending cocaine to administrative regions there which had been slower to implement regulations. It is evident that they were actively despatching it to places like Calcutta and Rangoon where controls were already in place, and working out the routes for getting cocaine there without detection or interdiction.

The contract mentioned in the 1904/5 annual report which the company’s representative in India, Mr Göhner, signed with “H. Parsons and Co.” turned out to be a wise one. This firm makes an appearance in the records of the Excise Department in 1905 where the enthusiasm of one of the partners for working out ways to get round British regulations seemed to match that of the Merck executives;

Mr Parsons clearly knew what he was doing. Having signed up with Merck he relocated himself to Bangalore. The city was in the Mysore princely state which did not get round to imposing controls on cocaine until 1907. There he collected the consignments of the substance perfectly legally and redistributed them to contacts around the country who resided in places where controls had already been imposed. At the time, there was nothing to stop him doing this while in Bangalore, and the risk would be run by those collecting his parcels from the post office at the other end.

Another episode captured in the colonial records shows the risks that some were willing to take in order to profit from this trade. A Dr Roy of Calcutta was detained on the Madras Railway during a journey in November 1905 from Bangalore to Calcutta with 256 ounces of cocaine in his possession. As this is the equivalent of just over seven kilogrammes of the substance he was charged with unlicensed possession and transport of the drug. It transpired that he had invested 5000 rupees in the transaction, a considerable sum which, by way of comparison, would have bought Dr Roy 2.5 kilogrammes of gold at the time, had he chosen to speculate more wisely.Footnote ⁴⁵ His decision to collect the cocaine in person presumably shows that he was worried about the risk of fraud, or of his consignment going missing in the post. By acting as his own courier, however, he had increased the risk of being apprehended in the act of smuggling cocaine. As mentioned before, regulations were not imposed in Bangalore until 1907 so at the time of his return journey to Calcutta in November 1905 he was free to carry around as much of the cargo as he wanted. But as soon as the train crossed the border into the Madras Presidency his seven kilos far exceeded the small amount he was entitled to possess as a doctor under regulations implemented there in May 1905. He was caught red-handed.Footnote ⁴⁶ Dr Roy was fined a hefty 1000 rupees, and perhaps in order to ensure that the Government received this, an arrangement was made;

At this redemption price it seems that Dr Roy lost 4272 rupees, or eighty-five percent of his original stake, on this gamble.Footnote ⁴⁸ While it is not clear from the above who exactly paid the “redemption” the extract does make plain where this large consignment had come from.Footnote ⁴⁹ Merck had been exposed as the source of a consignment of cocaine that was so large it would meet any legitimate medical need many times over, and which was destined to be smuggled into jurisdictions where its sale and possession were subject to restrictive regulations. This is how the decisions made by Merck’s executives and recorded in the annual report played out in practice.

Merck cocaine across Asia after 1905

Mentions of cocaine in Asia within the pages of the Merck annual reports end in 1904/5, but that did not mean that the flows of their product into India ceased. Even as the British authorities consolidated efforts at control, Merck cocaine continued to find its way into their territories through new routes. The Bangalore route was closed when the Mysore princely state bowed to pressure to impose restrictions in 1907. However, that same year fifteen parcels of cocaine were detained at the Bombay Post Office which contained a total of eleven kilos of the substance. It was destined for the Portuguese colony of Goa on the west coast of India. This was significant as the British authorities had received reports from the United Provinces (roughly equivalent to today’s state of Uttar Pradesh) that cocaine was being smuggled there from Goa.Footnote ⁵⁰

The issue here was of transit post. In November 1906 the Government of India had passed a new regulation which prohibited “the bringing by sea or by land into British India of cocaine by means of the post.” However, the Director-General of Post Office there had ruled that this did not apply to “transit parcels,” that is, those which arrived at a depot in India (in this case Bombay) but which were then forwarded on to a destination outside of British jurisdiction. Clearly those observing the situation had been quick to spot the loophole. Indeed, a consignment of cocaine seized earlier in 1907 by Customs in Bombay had been taken out of their hands and despatched onward to Goa under the orders of the Director-General.Footnote ⁵¹

The Portuguese authorities confirmed that these amounts of cocaine far exceeded anything remotely resembling legitimate medical requirements in their territories, which they estimated at about four ounces or just over one hundred grams annually. Representatives of the firm to which the parcels were destined were called in front of the Chief Health Officer of Portuguese India and asked to explain themselves. The matter was one of error, they claimed, in which they were an innocent party. Although they did not deny making an order from Germany, they said it had been for a much smaller amount. The larger consignment was attributed to “some one by mistake on the part of supplier [sic].” In fact the firm declared that they were now “indifferent” on the matter of whether the seized cocaine was forwarded to them or not, and the Portuguese Health Officer declared that “This office, therefore, is of opinion that the Customs House of Bombay should take steps in order to return the cocaine in question to the House of Merk of Germany.”Footnote ⁵² It seems that the latter were still in the business of selling enormous amounts of cocaine to India that could serve no medical purpose, presumably asking no questions about what it would be used for or where it could end up. The “transit parcels” loophole was closed by the British authorities in an order by the Government of India to the Director General of the Post Office of India in December 1907.Footnote ⁵³

The Merck annual reports contain no mention of this. But its pages give a hint as to what happened next. In 1914 a number of drugs seizures were made in British Malaya during March and April. Over 30 kilos of cocaine were concealed in trunks containing metalware and cigarette papers. Most of these containers had been sent by a certain European Trading Company of Copenhagen, and the Danish newspapers used in packing the trunks seemed to confirm their point of departure. Mr Baddeley, the Superintendent of Government Monopolies in what was then the Straits Settlements, ended his report on this incident with the observation that “the whole of the cocaine seized was in bottles and labelled as made by Merck of Darmstadt.”Footnote ⁵⁴ In 1913 the Merck annual report had named the European Trading Co as one of the “main firms” in Denmark for orders of their products, and added that the value of cocaine sales to their “Copenhagen agents” was worth approximately 16,000 Reichsmarks.Footnote ⁵⁵ While the locations were new, and no longer in India, the process was familiar. Merck was quietly selling large quantities of cocaine to partners willing and able to smuggle the German company’s product to Asia in defiance of the rules, regulations, and enforcement efforts, of the state authorities there.

By way of a postscript, at the Hague Opium of 1911/12 cocaine featured for the first time in the diplomatic deliberations that were driving the emerging international drugs regulatory system. It was a significant moment because, until then, those deliberations had been concerned only with opium-smoking in Asia. This was the first time that the processed, manufactured products of the Western pharmaceutical industry had been drawn into international efforts to assert a system of global control over psychoactive substances considered harmful. Cocaine, of course, has remained subject to those global controls ever since. The substance was included in deliberations there at the insistence of British colonial officials in Asia, precisely because they had been wrestling with Merck cocaine there for over a decade.Footnote ⁵⁶