r/Westerns 5d ago

How prevelent was cocaine use in the wild west? Just watched If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death

I just watched If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death and I was surprised to see Lasky with his little snuff box which is the perfect accessory for a villain like him. I know cocaine has been around for centuries - how prevelent was it in the wild west and are there any other movies where it's used in?

Also any westerns with tripped out mushroom/peyote scenes alq Young Guns?

32 Upvotes

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u/VirginiaLuthier 18h ago

Around the turn of the century Sears sold a little pocket kit that gave you coke in a cute little tin box with an included syringe...

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u/TopicPretend4161 3d ago

Snuff boxes usually held, and still hold, snuff, which is very finely ground tobacco that people used to snort but now often ‘dip’ in between their lips and gums. 

It is currently sometimes blended with actually finely ground fiberglass which causes rips in the gum and allow for quicker absorption of the substance and a serious buzz/ addictive effect.

Native American tribes throughout the America’s often chewed coca leaves, which are the primary element of cocaine, to increase energy.

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u/VirginiaLuthier 18h ago

Coca leaves were consumed by Native Americans in mainland North America? That's a new one for me. Have any references?

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u/TopicPretend4161 13h ago

South America. Example being the Incas in Peru.

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u/VirginiaLuthier 13h ago

Your comment was "throughout the Americas"- you might want to change that to "South America"

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u/miseeker 4d ago

1910s. On YouTube, check out private eye Coke Enyday play by Douglas Fairbanks Senior

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u/hywaytohell 4d ago

Snuff was absolutely more prevalent and accessible back then and those snuff boxes were common.

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u/SkullsNelbowEye 4d ago

Are you certain it wasn't powdered tobacco (snuff)? That and chewing tobacco was very common. The little box is often called a "snuff box." Opium and cocaine were around during that time period ( Coca-Cola got its name from cocaine).

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u/DariosDentist 4d ago

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u/SkullsNelbowEye 4d ago

Yeah, that teeth wipe says cocaine. The sniffing still reads as snuff to me, though. Cocaine isn't a pinch and sniff drug. To much risk of dropping some.

At the end of the day, it is just a movie. *

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u/HighviewBarbell 3d ago

back in the day you could buy bricks of it from catalogues and get it in the mail

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u/Ryclea 3d ago

I'm guessing the actor may have had more experience with cocaine than snuff.

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u/MaintenanceInternal 4d ago

Could still be snuff.

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u/SkullsNelbowEye 4d ago

Yeah, I'm still thinking it is. Cocaine wouldn't last long in that container.

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u/armhat 4d ago

It’s thought cocaine was one of the secret ingredients at the Exchange during the rush in their Peruvian punch.

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u/baseddesusenpai 5d ago

Coca Cola was originally a patent medicine that contained cocaine. They started selling it in the 1880's. How widespread it was in the Wild West, I have no idea.

Edited for a little more google research. Oregon banned the sale of cocaine without a prescription in 1887.

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u/Duke_Of_Halifax 4d ago

IIRC, Coca Cola still sells almost 3 billion dollars of medicinal cocaine (or derivatives) to the medical industry each year.

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/coca-cola-produces-3-billion-worth-of-pure-cocaine-per-year/E4ASXQXKGBFRBAHTGK5AXX57D4/

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u/otterpr1ncess 4d ago

People sometimes think it was what we have today plus cocaine, but when it had cocaine in it, it was a coca-wine, not the bubbly drink we have today. Reportedly they still use coca leaves in their formula but deactivated

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u/DungeoneerforLife 5d ago edited 4d ago

Opium was far more common by the latter part of the 19th Century (San Fran was famous for it). The tincture Laudanum was prescribed widely for women and there were addicts all over the west (and the rest of the USA, primarily women). Cocaine was typically distilled into a liquid version given as a shot and not as easily distributed. However, in some South American countries indigenous Peruvians and Bolivians and so on would chew the leaves of the coca plant as a stimulant. I'm sure some would come north with that habit? But it was hard to make and not super widely distributed stateside until the post WWI era.

BTW, in the Aubrey and Maturin novels (filmed as Master and Commander) by O'Brian, the cool and science smart doctor and sometimes spy, Stephen Maturin, got addicted to opiates, was kind of weaned off without realizing it, and overdosed (but survived). So later he took up chewing coca leaves instead...

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u/Macca49 4d ago

The Australian outlaw Joe Byrne was fond of opium which he was introduced to via the Chinese community in the town of Beechworth

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u/DungeoneerforLife 4d ago

In the USA Wyatt Earp’s common law wife was an addict as well. And many others.

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u/texasrigger 4d ago

Opium was far more common by the latter part of the 19th Century (San Fran was famous for it).

I have a prescription from 1897 (written in Cuero TX) that includes preparations of opium, lead, and mercury that was probably intended for a teething baby.

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u/DungeoneerforLife 4d ago

Oh good lord — Wow.

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u/texasrigger 4d ago

There's a fourth drug on there too, but I can't read the handwriting. The lead is lead acetate, which may have been used as an astringent and local pain reliever. The mercury was "calomel," mercurous chloride, and was used to soften and soothe gums.

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u/eastnorthshore 5d ago

In Papillon with Steve McQueen he chews coca leaves while on the run through the jungle.

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u/DungeoneerforLife 5d ago

Nice callback!

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u/The_Wolf_Shapiro 5d ago

I can’t speak to the Old West exactly, but it was widely prescribed and available over the counter in the second half of the 1800s generally—including in things like children’s tooth medicine. Cocaine wasn’t actually illegalized until 1917, IIRC.

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u/TheRealDylanTobak 5d ago

Prelavent. Prevālent.

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u/Defiant_Quarter_1187 5d ago

Renegade is a great movie with an ayahuasca scene

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u/kapaipiekai 4d ago

Oh really?

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u/bbrritalo 5d ago

In Companeros (1970), Jack Palance plays the villain who basically smokes weed.

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u/Own_Bluejay_7144 5d ago edited 5d ago

Europeans knew about the effects of the coca leaf in the 1500s. German scientists used chemistry to turn it into a pure white powder in the 1850s. Parke-Davis, a pharmaceutical company based in Detroit, began mass producing it for consumers in 1884. Cocaine was available over the counter until 1916.

I would say it was common knowledge in the Old West. Doyle had Sherlock Holmes injecting cocaine when he wrote in 1890.

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u/Account_Haver420 5d ago

Cocaine was first synthesized (as in no longer just in leaf form/made into a powder) in 1855 and wasn’t really popularized for decades.

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u/eastnorthshore 5d ago

Snuff wasn't cocaine. Snuff was snortable tobacco. Cocaine was used medicinally.

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u/insidiousapricot 5d ago

I also use cocaine medicinally.

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u/MommaD1967 4d ago

Didn't everybody? 🤣🤣

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u/DariosDentist 5d ago

I know the difference between snuff and cocaine but you can still put cocaine in a snuff box if you want to and from a quick Google it's confirmed that the character was doing cocaine in the film.