Roaring Twenties Drugs and Poisons

I‘ve come across another great drug that I can use in my stories. Thanks to my official poison advisor, Dr. Mark Pugh (a pharmacist), I’ve learned about the properties of Veronal. This was a popular sleeping powder in the 1920s, but like all sleep medicine, it could be dangerous. Many people were poisoned with it accidentally or committed suicide with it or were murdered. Great drug for a mystery writer, huh??

The normal dose was between 5 and 10 grains. My main character, Jessie, is small and female, so she takes the single dose of 5 grains to help her sleep on a long, cross-country train ride. A lethal dose has been reported to be around 50 grains. Veronal came in powdered form in a folded paper called a powder paper. The paper would be unfolded and the powder dropped into a beverage and drunk. It was also made in cachets which are like small ravioli. The powder would be measured out and placed on a wafer made of a flour/water type dough or rice paper. Another wafer was placed on top and the edges sealed with water and pressure. The cachet was placed on the tongue and chased with a beverage or dissolved into a beverage and drunk.

For my story, RENTING SILENCE, I am using Veronal in powder papers. The powder would dissolve more quickly than a cachet when placed surreptitiously into a drink. A good knock-out dose would be around 15-20 grains (3 or 4 powder papers) depending on the size of the person. This dose would not be fatal, but it would put someone to sleep in 30 minutes, and they would remain asleep for 6-8 hours. 

I have Jessie buying Veronal in papers at the drug store for her own use, as she boards the train. The trip between the west coast and Chicago lasted 3 nights, and one paper of 5 grains helps her sleep. Later, when she tangles with some Bad Guys, she thinks to slip her Veronal into their glasses to knock them out. I am half finished with this book, so I haven’t reached the Bad Guy scene yet, but at least I know how Jessie will knock them out!

Government-Poisoned Booze

Who knew? I certainly didn’t realize that it was official government policy during the Roaring Twenties to poison alcohol so as to deter illegal drinking.

Of course I knew that thousands of people died or were blinded by poisoned alcohol–that’s fairly common knowledge. It was, I thought, nearly all due to illegally made “bathtub gin” and liquor made in makeshift stills, where people would incorporate all kinds of poisonous ingredients to give their brew extra kick. Or sometimes they didn’t realize how tainted their product was. (Examples included kerosene, carbolic acid, mercury, and carbolic acid; sometimes the alcohol was actually industrial alcohol.)  This is all true, but it was only a part of the story.

According to Deborah Blum, “Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.”

Shocked? So was I.

I’ll be incorporating some of this in my third novel in the Roaring Twenties series. My bootlegger character schemes to sidestep government prohibition by selling legal alcohol for medicinal purposes and then abusing the loophole. I’ll work in something about this purposeful poisoning.

For more of Blum’s findings, see http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2010/02/the_chemists_war.single.html

Another good link is: http://blogs.plos.org/speakeasyscience/2010/12/31/at-the-prohibition-bar/

Antique Poison for Sale!

An alert reader pointed out this item for sale on eBay–an unopened bottle of mercury bichloride in tablet form. (Can you read the label, I hope?) This was the poison that killed Olive Thomas (Jack Pickford’s wife) in Paris, although her case involved a liquid version. It was used all too often in the Roaring Twenties for suicides. Note that it says For External Use Only. How do you use a pill for external use only? Dissolve in water. This drug was commonly used as treatment for syphilis. 

I wanted to buy the bottle for my collection of Twenties memorabilia that I’m planning to take with me when I do book signings for THE IMPERSONATOR, but I didn’t handle the eBay bidding correctly and missed my chance. Someone else got it for $10! I’d have paid more than that. Oh well, maybe another bottle will surface before I need it. The mystery doesn’t come out until fall of next year, 2013, so I have plenty of time to add to my collection. 

Prohibition: Disaster or Success?

Prohibition is widely thought to have been a disaster. It was supposed to make the population healthier, but it did the opposite.

1. Arrests for drunken driving increased.

2. Cirrhosis of the liver cases increased.

3. Poisonings, death, and paralysis from bad alcohol skyrocketed.

But  contrary to what is widely believed, Prohibition did lower the amount of drinking, at first by a whopping 70%. But as the months went by and illegal booze became ever more available, alcohol consumption increased. Nonetheless, at the end of Prohibition in 1933, it was still 30% lower than at the start in 1920. And it wasn’t until after World War II that consumption equaled the 1920 amount. So perhaps Prohibition succeeded, a little, after all. But the cost was huge. 

The Lure of Absinthe

This green alcoholic beverage has had a colorful career since its debut in the late 18th century. Flavored with wormwood, fennel, anise, and other herbs, the beverage has a bitter, licorice flavor and a high alcoholic content. Drinking it was supposed to bring on hallucinations. 

 

Absinthe reached the pinnacle of its popularity in the Roaring Twenties in Paris, where the bohemian population of writers and artists made it their trademark beverage in spite of it being illegal. Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, Oscar Wilde, and Ernest Hemingway are associated with absinthe. 

There were several ways to consume the drink, but the most famous one involves placing a sugar lump on a slotted spoon held over a glass of absinthe, then pouring ice water over the sugar cube. The beverage turns milky. 

Many countries banned the production of absinthe in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries because it was believed to be more dangerous than other alcoholic beverages. After this was disproved–it has no hallucinogenic effects after all–it gradually became legal. In 2007, it became legal in the United States, so you can buy it if you like. Personally, I can’t stand licorice-flavored drinks like pastis, ouzo, pernod, or anisette, so I’ll pass. 

Poison Booze

The trouble with Prohibition is that it made liquor illegal . . . which made it impossible to regulate. Historians estimate that by the time Prohibition was rescinded in 1933, about 98% of all liquor contained poisons of some sort. Scary, huh?

Part of the problem was greed, part was amateur manufacturing. Adding embalming fluid gave bathtub gin an extra kick, so that was not uncommon. Some say this was the introduction of fruity mixed drinks, which were invented by bartenders to cover up the bad taste of the illegal hooch. Adulterated booze was known as money rum, sometimes bathtub gin. It was seldom real rum or gin, just moonshine, and it was often deadly.

Seems everyone knew someone who had died or gone blind after drinking bad booze. It probably happened far more often than anyone today appreciates–without any reliable statistics (it was illegal, after all) we can’t really know the extent of the devastation. Estimates by historians today suggest that during the first year of Prohibition, one thousand people died from adulterated liquor. By the fifth year, the annual toll had risen to four thousand. Why didn’t this cause more of a scandal? Remember, communications in that era were weak. People didn’t know much about what was going on in other states or even other parts of their own state. It’s a very sad side of the madcap “Roaring Twenties.” 

The Jack Pickford Scandals #2

     In 1916, Mary Pickford’s little brother Jack married Olive Thomas, a beautiful Ziegfield girl who had transitioned successfully from stage to silent film. Here is Olive in her famous Vargas calendar pose.  And here’s how a contemporary described them: “Two innocent-looking children, they were the gayest, wildest brats who ever stirred the stardust on Broadway,” wrote Frances Marion, a prominent Hollywood scriptwriter who knew them well. “Both were talented, but they were much more interested in playing the roulette of life than in concentrating on their careers.” Both were also alcoholics, cocaine addicts, promiscuous, and infected with syphilis.

     Though publicists sketched lives of blissful love and devotion, Olive and Jack had way too many issues for a successful marriage. In Paris in 1920 for what was billed as a second honeymoon, the couple stayed at the Ritz and frequented the popular nightspots. Back at the hotel after a wild night that was rumored to have included plenty of cocaine and alcohol (remember—no Prohibition in France), Olive drank a large amount of bichloride of mercury, something often prescribed for syphilis and meant to be applied topically. She died a gruesome death a couple days later in a French hospital.

     Contradicting stories abound. A police investigation and autopsy ruled the death accidental and Jack and the body were quickly shipped back to America. But some thought Olive had committed suicide, others thought Jack had poisoned her, still others believed she had intended to poison Jack but made a mistake.  

     Here’s the New York Times headlines from that day.

PARIS AUTHORITIES INVESTIGATE DEATH OF OLIVE THOMAS

 Police Seek Evidence on Rumors of Drug and Champagne Orgies

REFUSE TO RELEASE BODY

Former American Officer, Sentenced for Selling Cocaine, One of Those Questioned

PICKFORD IN DOCTOR’S CARE

Police Have Not Yet Obtained His Story of How the Actress Drank Poison

     Read the whole article at http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9403E2D61E3CEE3ABC4952DFBF66838B639EDE

     Jack married two more times, each time to a pretty Ziegfield showgirl, and each time, the marriage ended in divorce or separation with rumors of infidelity, physical abuse, and substance abuse. Like Olive, Jack died young and in a hospital, a victim of his lifestyle and various addictions.

Popular Poisons Part II: Mercury Bichloride

In the days before antibiotics, physicians used mercury bichloride (also called mercury chloride without the “bi”) to treat a variety of diseases, notably syphillis. Highly toxic, odorless, and colorless, it was meant to be applied topically to the sores that developed as this disease progressed. It was also used in very diluted form (1 part to 1000) for tonsillitis.
Several deaths during the Roaring Twenties brought this poison to the attention of the entire country. The first was the death in Paris of silent film star Olive Thomas, wife of leading man Jack Pickford whose sister, Mary Pickford, was the foremost actress of her day. Whether Olive’s death was accidental, as Jack always claimed, suicide, or murder was never determined. The French were quick to ship the body, Jack, and the scandal home to America where the controversy raged for months. No definitive cause of death was ever established. To read more, check wikipedia or http://www.silentsaregolden.com/articles/lpolivethomasdeath.html
Another highly publicized death occurred in 1925 when a young woman named Madge Oberholtzer was kidnapped, tortured, and raped by the head of Indiana’s powerful Ku Klux Klan. She managed to get hold of some mercury bichloride pills and swallowed them. She died a few days later after having had the presence of mind to accuse the Grand Dragon in signed testimony. Her written words were instrumental in convicting the man of murder, and the resulting publicity destroyed the KKK in Indiana. Details at wikipedia or http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=8390
Mercury bichloride was available at drug stores, sometimes by prescription only, sometimes not. Depending upon the state, a person who purchased poison of any sort was supposed to sign a register so there would be a record of the transaction. (We still have to do that for some drugs today.)

I use mercury bichloride and the poison registries in my second novel (yet to be published). If anyone has access to drug store “poison books” from the 1920s, I’d sure like to see a genuine example!

Popular Poisons of the Roaring Twenties

Popular Poisons of the Roaring Twenties. A great senior thesis topic, huh? And why not? It’s a fascinating subject, not to mention a necessity when writing about murder and suicide in the 1920s.  

Part One: Arsenic.

One of the oldest poisons is arsenic. Because symptoms of arsenic poisoning are so fuzzy, it has been a murder weapon of choice since Roman times, if not earlier. There are legitimate uses, of course, the main one being pest extermination, and arsenic has appeared on the shelves of general stores in America since general stores first appeared in the colonies. A variety of brands developed over the years, including my favorite (and the one I use in my novel): Rough on Rats.

Don’t you love that name? So alliterative, so growlingly fierce. You just know Rough on Rats is going to eliminate your problem, critter or human–especially when you see the marketing images of a dead rat with his little paws in the air.

                                                                                                                                                   

 

 

 

 

 

Or this other great visual of the chaos that occurs when you fail to use Rough on Rats:

                                                                   

Caption says: “All this trouble might have been avoided by the use of our Fifteen Cent box of Rough on Rats. Clears out Rats, Mice, Flies, Bed-bugs, Ants, Roaches, Mosquitos, &c.” 

I’m trying to locate an actual package of Rough on Rats for my collection of Roaring Twenties ephemera . . . no luck yet but I have one of the country’s leading experts in period store merchandise on the look-out for me. Suzanne of Squashapenny Junction has tens of thousands of merchandise antiques and collectibles (ie, old but not antique) crammed into her old store in Doswell, Virginia, and she constantly travels all over the U.S. to find more.  (I’d put in a link but she doesn’t own a computer . . . her inventory is in her head.)

Coming next . . . Poisons Part Two: Mercury Bichloride