Since discovering Agatha Christie, I’ve read two or three of her novels, and at the same time I’ve read a couple of other Golden Age crime novels, Murder must advertise, by Dorothy L Sayers and Death of an Airman by Christopher St John Sprigg,

Now my choice of Golden Age reading has been driven by happenstance.

If, in the course of cataloguing the Athenaeum’s Historic Book collection, I come across an interesting looking Golden Age mystery, I make a note of it, and then look to see if it’s available as a public domain download, or available cheaply second hand from somewhere, and then read them as part of my bedtime reading.

Nothing extraordinary there.

But the thing which struck me was that in both Dorothy L Sayer’s novel and Christopher St John Sprigg’s novel, the plots, however improbable, revolve around cocaine smuggling, and there’s even a sub-plot around cocaine abuse in the Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

Now, crime novels usually reflect the stresses of a society and its concerns.

Obviously cocaine abuse and smuggling was a serious concern in 1920’s and 1930’s Britain.

But how did we get there?

Like many things, its a consequence of world war one.

In 1916, the war was not going well for Britain.

Locked in an endless war of attrition on the western front, losses were mounting. Men were increasingly reluctant to volunteer, so much so that conscription had to be introduced in January 1916.

There was rationing at home and increasing taxes and inflation were squeezing the genteel middle class precariat. Licensing laws restricted the sale of alcohol, in part because of a fear that munitions and other essential worker would blow their wages on drink.

In Ireland, Easter 1916 saw the Rising, when a few nationalists took over the General Post Office building. The British, incompetent as ever, massively over reacted making a bad thing worse, and to quote Yeats, a terrible beauty was born.

(I’ve often wondered, without any evidence whatsoever if George V’s apparent reluctance to save the Russian imperial family after the Revolutions of 1917, was influenced by having seen how quickly the situation in Ireland span out of control after Easter 1916.)

And on the western front itself the continual stress and fear had begun to affect the army, and discipline could do only so much.

Increasingly officers began to self medicate to cope with the stress, and increasingly they turned to cocaine, so much so that in May 1916 an emergency order was made under the Defence of the Realm act forbidding the supply of cocaine to any member of the armed forces, except when prescribed by a doctor.

The ban on cocaine was formalised by the Dangerous Drugs Act in 1920

Previously there had been no restrictions on the supply and consumption of cocaine, or indeed other drugs subsequently banned.

Asthma cigarettes, which basically contained stramonium, a herb whose smoke when inhaled dilated the passages in the lungs and helped the smoker breathe more easily – counterintuitive I know – would sometimes contain a little herbal cannabis as a relaxant. Not after 1920.

And increasingly, cocaine became the drug of choice in the night clubs of London, as documented by Marek Kohn in his book Dope Girls.

In short, cocaine rapidly became the drug of choice among what came to be termed ‘The Bright Young Things’, the sons and daughters of the British upper classes, after world war one.

Cocaine was a problem, a real problem, and hence its appearance in the crime novels of the time…