Drug addiction was a growing menace a century ago. While people in many places including Maine spent huge amounts of time and money battling liquor, the sale of cocaine, morphine and other narcotics was almost unregulated. Cocaine, for example, could be purchased in local pharmacies, usually without a prescription, and it was sold openly on the streets, according to Steven B. Karch in his book “A Brief History of Cocaine.” Doctors used it at one time or another to treat everything from prostate enlargement and asthma to morphine addiction.

Even where there were a few regulations, (in Maine you needed a prescription to buy cocaine, but not opium, morphine or heroin, as early as 1903), enforcement was lax and some doctors and pharmacists made money by selling drugs, according to Dr. Karch. Patent medicines like Dr. Tucker’s Asthma Specific contained large amounts of cocaine. Dr. Fahrney’s Teething Syrup contained morphine while Dr. James’ Soothing Syrup contained heroin. Dr. Moffett’s Teething Powder was made from opium. Combinations of these substances and others – often laced heavily with alcohol – were popular, and available by mail or over the counter.

In Maine, where liquor prohibition was a public obsession, newspaper announcements of raids on pharmacies stocked with liquor-laced medicines were not uncommon. The narcotics problem was still evolving. The public was struggling to understand its extent. Many people regarded addiction as a moral issue rather than a legal or medical problem.

When news stories appeared saying the city marshal of Bath was trying to figure out what to do with a young man who was addicted to cocaine and wanted to be allowed to continue taking it, an editorial writer at the Bangor Daily News urged a cautious approach. There were large numbers of people in Maine addicted to alcohol, tobacco and even caffeine, he wrote. Many of them were wounded veterans who were prescribed morphine or opium by doctors.

Cocaine was just another drug and “rightly administered it is as safe as tobacco,” said the editorial on Aug. 22, 1906. “In the interests of humanity it would seem that there are cases of pronounced slavery to drugs that the best thing to do is to permit the victims to continue in their course.”

Indeed, drug addicts were more to be pitied than punished. This was certainly true of Miss Frances Lee, a popular 19-year-old store clerk who died probably from a morphine overdose on April 11, 1907. Her friends told the Bangor Daily News that she was “a great sufferer from nervousness and heart trouble and was driven to the use of the drug to relieve the intense pain.”

She had been a patient at Eastern Maine Insane Hospital briefly, but had been “discharged as cured.” A druggist told officials that she had once bought morphine pills from him, quite awhile ago, not recently of course, and immediately had tried to swallow a great number of them in the store, but had been prevented.

Concerns about addiction were increasing. A wire story about drug addicts in Boston appeared in the Bangor Daily Commercial on May 16. It said the total number of “fiends” there was over 8,000 and increasing. They included people from every walk of life, even doctors. Cocaine, opium, heroin, codeine, morphine and other drugs were available in many forms in drug stores or on the streets. All one had to do was find a druggist willing to sell.

The raw material was being smuggled into the country. On Sept. 3, it was reported that “a gang of opium smugglers” was entering the United States from Canada through Eastport and Lubec. The U.S. Treasury Department had appointed officers to catch them.

As the year passed, the drug problem escalated to a “war” at least in Massachusetts where the legislature enacted a law making it a crime to sell any preparation containing cocaine or for doctors to prescribe it “except under the most rigid supervision, and except for certain forms of disease.” The Bangor Daily News’ editorial writer was still hesitant. “The puzzle about the [Massachusetts] cocaine law lies in the fact that among the dozens and scores of dangerous drugs which are kept by the pharmacists, cocaine alone should be singled out for summary punishment.” Maine had a similar law by 1913.

Move the clock ahead a decade or so. Drug pushers were in the ascendancy. “DOPE TRAFFIC PAYS BIG PROFITS HERE,” according to a headline in the Bangor Daily News on June 1, 1918. The lead pointed out the obvious: “While so much is being said and done about the sale of whiskey in Maine, authorities seem to have entirely overlooked the dope trade, which of late has been increasing at a tremendous rate.” Dope in various forms was as easy to obtain in Bangor as whiskey. The police had made half-hearted attempts to catch the dealers, but the trade went on practically unchecked.

The newspaper identified suspects without names. One was the wife of a former “railroad man” who made her home at “a well-known resort” on the West Side. She received regular shipments from the Maritime Provinces via train. Another young woman “well-known in Bangor’s underworld” had established a supply from Lowell, Mass. Competition between the two was fierce, “leading at times to personal combat.” Meanwhile, it was said that two doctors in a nearby city were getting $2 for prescriptions good for one gram of cocaine at a drug store.

Regulatory laws had already been passed with many more to come. Eventually, the nation decided it cared more about regulating the sale of narcotics than liquor, and the drug wars escalated exponentially.

Wayne E. Reilly may be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.