HIGH ACHIEVERS

How taking drugs changed the science of the self.

- CLARE BUCKNELL

More than fifty years before it was isolated as a drug, Samuel Taylor Coleridge dreamed up cocaine. In the early years of the nineteenth century, the poet was increasingly dependent on opium, a “free-agency-annihilating Poison,” as he called it, which sapped his will and made him despondent. “A Gymnastic Medicine is wanting,” he wrote in his notebook during the winter of 1808-09, “a system of forcing the Will & motive faculties into action.” The medicine he envisaged would be a kind of anti-opium, a tonic to kickstart the nerves, restore the mind’s athletic powers, and repair the broken link between volition and accomplishment. It would be a second, health-giving “poison” to work on the first.