Annie C. Meyers

Eight Years in Cocaine Hell (eBook, ePUB)

The True Story of a Victorian Woman's Descent into Madness and Addiction

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

"To the sensitive (cocaine) is soothing, to the stupid it is enlivening, to the exhausted it gives strength and mental vigor. To the sufferers from pain it gives peace..." Dr. T.D. Crothers, 1899

"I never used any other drug but the clear cocaine and I believe that I am the only living person in the world to-day who ever took two hundred grains in twenty-four hours and survived." Annie C. Meyers

The autobiographical Eight Years in Cocaine Hell (1902) recounts in shockingly straightforward style the transformation of Annie C. Meyers, affluent and well-connected Chicago widow, to junkie, thief, forger, inventor of the 'Cocaine Dance', and ultimately authoress of the first drug confessional written by a woman.

It was 1894. Annie Meyers had a bad cold, and her lawyer advised her to try Birney's Catarrh Powder, in which then-legal cocaine was a principal active ingredient. She rapidly became addicted to the drug, ran through her money and travelled the USA shoplifting, house-breaking and writing forged checks to support her habit.

Arrested repeatedly, miraculously escaping a custodial sentence, Annie finally tried safe-blowing and was collared for the final time: 'homeless and friendless, degraded and frenzied, insane, a broken-down and pitiful wreck of what I had once been.' She had lost most of her teeth (one gold tooth she had extracted herself and sold), her upper jaw was eaten away and ulcers covered much of her body. She was down to about five and a half stones in weight. Remarkably, and happily, she recovered, with the help of her long-suffering sister and the St. Luke Society, who encouraged and originally published this concise, ground-breaking memoir.

"Her book established a literary genre, and her case helped to outlaw cocaine." Stuart Walton, Intoxicology

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Dean Street Press
• Seitenzahl: 74
• Erscheinungstermin: 4. April 2016
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781911095842
• Artikelnr.: 44928176

Autorenporträt

Annie M. Meyers was born in 1871 in Buffalo, New York. She came of well-to-do stock, her mother being first cousin to industrialist Jay Gould. After marrying US naval officer Victor Meyers, the couple settled in Chicago. Annie Meyers was appointed an alternate member on the Board of Lady Managers of the World's Columbian Exposition in 1890, one year after Captain Meyers died.

Annie Meyers' memoir Eight Years in Cocaine Hell was the result of an addiction to cocaine which began with her innocently taking Birney's Catarrh Remedy (largely comprised of then-legal cocaine) in 1894 - a step which swiftly led to financial ruin, a career of crime and a terrible deterioration in physical and mental health. Nonetheless, and with the aid of her sister and the St. Luke Society in Chicago, she recovered from her addiction, regained her health and much of her position in society, before her death in 1914.

Eight Years in Cocaine Hell was published in 1902 and is viewed by historians as the first memoir of addiction to be written by a woman.