SPOTLIGHT ON…
Strange Tales from the History of Addiction Treatment
By William L. White
Efforts by professionals to “treat” alcoholism and other
addictions have a long and colorful history. Alcoholics have been forced to
drink their own urine and forced to drink wine in which an eel had been
suffocated. They have been surreptitiously dosed with everything from mole
blood to sparrow dung and subjected to the “Swedish treatment” in which
everything they consumed and even their clothes and bedding were saturated with
whiskey. They have been prescribed dietary treatments that included the apple,
salt, grape, banana, onion, and watermelon cures. They have been fed gold, iron
and bark to quell their appetite for alcohol.
Harm done in the name of good is an enduring theme in the
history of addiction treatment. Even Dr. Benjamin Rush, the father of the
American disease concept of alcoholism, treated alcoholics by blistering,
bleeding, and unknowingly poisoning them with mercury-laden medicines. In the 19th
century, alcoholics and addicts were routinely prescribed alcohol, narcotics,
marijuana, sedatives, stimulants, and hallucinogens. Dr. J.B. Bently prescribed
cocaine by the pound as a treatment for alcohol and morphine addiction and
reported, as a testament to the cocaine’s effectiveness, that his patients were
requesting additional quantities of cocaine and that they had completely lost
their appetite for alcohol and morphine. There were “bromide sleep treatments” for narcotic
withdrawal that killed 20% of patients undergoing the procedure. There was the
physician who, noting that alcohol intake decreased among his patients
suffering active stages of gonorrhea, recommended medically infecting
alcoholics with gonorrhea as a way to save the expense of sanatorium treatment.
Through the first half of the 20th century alcoholics and
addicts were subjected to legally mandated sterilization on the grounds that it
would prevent the birth of future generations of alcoholics and could treat the
underlying physical causes of alcoholism. There were early 20th century “serum
therapies” that involved raising blisters on the addict’s skin, withdrawing the
serum from the blisters, and then injecting this serum into the addict during
withdrawal. There were also withdrawal therapies in the 1930s utilizing
substances that could induce psychoses of up to two months duration.
Alcoholics and addicts were indiscriminately exposed to
whatever was in vogue within the broader arenas of medicine or psychiatry. The
1940s and 1950s witnessed addiction treatments that included electroconvulsive
and insulin shock therapies and the use of psychosurgery (the prefrontal
lobotomy). At least one alcoholic commended the latter, reporting that,
following the surgery, he could get “twice as tight on half the hooch.” The
1950s also witnessed the use of methamphetamine as a medically prescribed
substitute for alcohol and heroin — a practice that nurtured the subsequent
growth of a methamphetamine injection subculture.
It is easy to look back with condescension at the practice
of treating morphine addiction with cocaine or alcoholism with practically
every other psychoactive drug. It is easy to look back with outrage at the
mandatory sterilization of alcoholics or their being blistered, bled, and
subjected to invasive interventions from psychosurgery to shock therapies. But
an important lesson is that the harmfulness of these interventions was not
visible in their own time. History demands that those seeking treatment for
addiction to alcohol and other drugs honor the adage, “Let the buyer beware”
and demand that treatment providers adhere to the ultimate ethical
mandate: “First do no harm!”
William White is the
author of “Slaying the Dragon: The History of Addiction Treatment and Recovery
in America,”
from which this article is abstracted.