Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze (43 page)

Before 1970, there had been little government attention paid to drugs. The change, when it came, was dramatic. In Britain, the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act classified and outlawed harmful substances. In America, Richard Nixon declared war on the scourge of the age. Drugs prohibition had arrived.

There was optimism to start with. ‘We have turned the corner on drug addiction,’ the President announced in 1973. A Drug Enforcement Agency report in 1978 declared that ‘heroin availability continues to shrink.’ The truth was simpler. A whole sector of society had simply opted out of the law. In 1970, only fifteen per cent of Britons had tried an illegal drug. Twenty-five years later, that figure had risen to forty-five per cent. In 1991, twenty-six million Americans experimented with drugs.
¹¹

Society feared crime, and it feared a subversive counter-culture.
Prohibition fuelled both. The entire drugs industry, one of the world’s fastest-growing, was handed over to criminals, and the costs of illegal heroin addiction soon created a crime wave. A 1994 West Yorkshire survey reported that nearly all young offenders in their sample were regular drug-users. About half of the murders in the United States every year were reckoned to be drugs-related.
¹²

By opting for prohibition, governments had ruled out every other control they might have had over drugs. They couldn’t draw revenues from them. They couldn’t control where drugs were manufactured, sold or consumed. They had no influence over the industries which grew the raw materials for drugs, processed, transported, marketed and distributed them – nor over the profits they made. They had created a global criminal industry, and alongside it, a smuggling problem to dwarf the brandy-runners of the eighteenth century and Rum-Rows of Prohibition-era America.

The law was ignored, and with disregard came disrespect. Drug-use created a subversive counter-culture with its own language and its own customs. Prohibition also had a terrible effect on the health of drug-users. In the back-streets of St Giles’s, gin-drinkers had been sold dilute spirits contaminated with alum and sulphuric acid. Impure heroin, cut with bleach or cleaning fluid, would have an even more devastating effect on modern drug-users. It would kill 15,000 a year, according to one American estimate, while contaminated needles spread the modern plague of AIDS.

But there would be no change in the law. By the 1980s, drugs policy was no longer about the social causes of drug abuse, nor about the safety of users. It was about enforcement. In 1982, Vice-President George Bush launched the South Florida Task Force, the most ambitious attempt so far to stamp out drugs. In office as President, he would spend $40bn on the war on drugs. His initiatives had only one measurable effect: they filled up the jails. By 1990, over half of federal inmates were drug offenders.
At more than 25,000, they outnumbered the entire federal prison population a decade earlier.

And all along, there was never any sign that the war on drugs could be won. On 24 March 1743, after six and half years of prohibition, William Pulteney told the House of Lords, ‘It is well known, that punch and drams of all sorts, even common gin not excepted, are now sold openly and avowedly at all public houses, and many private shops and bye-corners; and it is likewise known, that they are now sold as cheap as they were before the present law was enacted.’
¹³
In December 1999, Barry Shaw, chief constable of Cleveland police, reported that ‘there is overwhelming evidence to show that the prohibition-based policy in this country since 1971 has not been effective in controlling the availability or use of proscribed drugs. If there is indeed a war against drugs, it is not being won … Illegal drugs are freely available, their price is dropping and their use is growing. It seems fair to say that violation of the law is endemic, and the problem seems to be getting worse despite our best efforts.’
¹⁴

In 1743, a British ministry, undemocratic, amateurish, unsupported by statistics, Civil Service or analytical tools, still managed to grasp the reality that the battle against Madam Geneva was lost, and that its costs in social disunity and crime were far worse than gin. Western governments of the late twentieth century held out against such a moment of truth. For modern politicians, as for 1730s reformers, drugs were too closely linked with all the evils of the new Age of Risk: with the loss of traditional values, with family breakdown and crime. No one could compromise on drugs without seeming to condone those changes.

What few of them noticed was that Drug Craze and Drug Panic might be Siamese twins; that it might be the very same forces of fear and uncertainty which drove young people to drugs and conservatives to family values. Just as in early eighteenth-century
London, or America in the Roaring Twenties, a new age has offered intoxicating transformations, a heady cocktail of opportunities and risks. In every metropolis, dealers reckon up their odds on the trading floors, and corner shops are littered with discarded scratch-cards. Televisions flash out their images of cars and holidays to those who will never be able to afford afford them; while in the shopping streets, plate-glass windows display clothes and cosmetics which promise to transform secretaries into supermodels.

The consequences should surprise no one. Somewhere a new Henry Fielding is shaking his head over the frivolity of the age, a Thomas Wilson is carving his career out of family values, and a Dr Stephen Hales is throwing up his hands in honest dismay. And somewhere, out of sight in the back-streets, Madam Geneva is still loitering along the gutter, barefoot in a ripped party dress, dispensing her gifts of comfort and misery, ecstasy and death.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION: The Alchemists

  
1
   William Phillip,
A Book of Secrets, translated out of the Dutch
, 1596

  
2
   de Mayerne,
The Distiller of London
, p96

  
3
   Morwyng,
The Treasure of Euonymus
, p161

  
4
   Morwyng,
The Treasure of Euonymus
, p127

  
5
   Morwyng,
The Treasure of Euonymus
, p83

  
6
   Forbes,
Short History of the Art of Distillation
, p106

  
7
   Forbes,
Short History of the Art of Distillation
, p97; Tlusty, ‘Water of Life,
Water of Death: The Controversy over Brandy and Gin in Early Modern Augsburg’, p20

  
8
   Brennan,
Public Drinking and Popular Culture in Eighteenth Century Paris
, p214

  
9
   Hales,
A Friendly Admonition to the Drinkers of Brandy, and other Distilled Spirituous Liquors
, p1

10
   
A Dissertation upon Drunkenness
, 1727, p14

CHAPTER ONE: The Glorious Revolution

  
1
   Blunt,
Geneva: a poem. Address’d to the Right Honourable Sir R
—
W
—, 1729

  
2
   van der Zee,
William and Mary
, p283

  
3
   Defoe,
Brief Case of the Distillers
, 1726, p17

  
4
   P Clark,
The English Alehouse
, p211

  
5
   Defoe,
Brief Case of the Distillers
, 1726, p18ff

  
6
   Filby,
A History of Food Adulteration and Analysis
, p157

  
7
   Davenant,
An Account of the Trade between Great-Britain, France, Holland etc
, first report, 1711, p42

  
8
   Ward,
London Spy
, XI, p205

  
9
   Ch(H), P28/6

10
   Filby,
A History of Food Adulteration and Analysis
, p158

11
   Malcolm,
Anecdotes of the Manners and Customs of London during the Eighteenth Century
, p131

12
   Ward,
London Spy
, II, p32

13
   Ward,
London Spy
, IX, p165

14
   Davenant,
Essay upon Ways and Means of Supplying the War
, p133

15
   de Saussure,
A Foreign View of England
, 16 Decemeber 1725

16
   Defoe,
Review
, 9 & 19 May 1713

17
   Chamberlayne quoted in Lecky,
History of England in the Eighteenth Century
, p476

18
   Defoe,
Brief Case of the Distillers
, 1726, p18ff

19
   de Saussure,
A Foreign View of England
, October 1726

20
   de Saussure,
A Foreign View of England
, 7 February 1727

21
   Lecky,
History of England in the Eighteenth Century
, p477

22
   French,
Nineteen Centuries of Drink in England
, p294

23
   Porter, ‘The Drinking Man’s Disease’

24
   Lindsay,
The Monster City
, p37ff

25
   P Clark,
The English Alehouse
, p209

26
   
A Dissertation upon Drunkenness
, 1727

27
   Defoe,
Brief Case of the Distillers
, 1726

28
   Quoted on title-page of Blunt,
Blunt to Walpole: a familiar epistle in behalf of the British Distillery
, 1730

29
   Place,
Drunkenness
, notes, BM Add. MSS 27825

30
   PH, 22 March 1743

31
   
A Dissertation upon Drunkenness
, 1727, p14

32
   
The Tavern Scuffle
, 1726

CHAPTER TWO: London

  
1
   Smollett,
Humphrey Clinker
, p117

  
2
   Inwood,
History of London
, p260ff

  
3
   Defoe,
A Tour thro’ the whole Island of Great Britain
, 1724–5

  
4
   Earle,
A City Full of People
, p50

  
5
   Defoe,
Everybody’s Business is Nobody’s Business
, 1725

  
6
   McKendrick, Brewer & Plumb,
The Birth of a Consumer Society
, p52

  
7
   
Low-life, or One Half of the World Knows not how the Other Half Live
, p10

  
8
   Phillips,
Mid-Georgian London
, p45

  
9
   Ward,
London Spy
, VIII, p138

10
   Fielding,
Tom Jones
, p171

11
   Fielding,
An Inquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers
, p26

12
   Inwood,
History of London
, p314

13
   
Angliae Tutamen … Being an account of the banks, lotteries, mines, diving, draining, lifting, and other engines, and many pernicious projects now on foot, tending to the destruction of trade
, 1696

14
   Chancellor,
Devil Take the Hindmost
, p81

15
   Davenant,
The True Picture of a Modern Whig
, 1701

16
   Earle,
The Making of the English Middle Class
, p151

17
   Andrew,
Philanthropy and Police
, p15

18
   Rudé,
Hanoverian London
, p71

19
   Fielding,
Tom Jones
, p416

20
   Fielding,
An Inquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers
, p38

21
   Smollett,
The Adventures of Roderick Random
, pp315 & 320

22
   Tom Brown,
Amusements Serious and Comical, Calculated for the Meridian of London
, 1700