The image of the Old West is inseparable from whiskey, but the reality of frontier intoxication went far beyond the saloon. In the 1870s, a customer could walk into a drugstore in a place like Tombstone and buy opium, morphine, cocaine, and cannabis, all perfectly legal and sitting on shelves beside the soap. The substances we now treat as dangerous narcotics were once ordinary merchandise, marketed as cures for everything from toothaches to melancholy. The frontier was awash in drugs, but what people actually used, and who actually used it, tells a far more complicated story.
Morphine was the foundational substance of the era. It had been isolated from the opium poppy by a German pharmacist in the early 1800s, and within a few decades it was being commercially manufactured and sold to the public. It was a genuinely effective painkiller, and in the 1850s the invention of the hypodermic syringe made it even more potent by allowing precise doses to be injected directly into the bloodstream. Some doctors even believed that injecting morphine was less habit-forming than swallowing it, a theory that proved disastrously wrong.
The Civil War is often blamed for producing a generation of addicts in a condition sometimes called soldiers’ disease, but historians who have studied nineteenth-century addiction closely have found that this narrative was exaggerated. Contemporary records barely mention the term, and the typical opiate addict of the era was not a veteran at all. It was a middle-aged, middle-class white woman whose own physician had prescribed opium-based medicine for cramps or what were politely called nervous complaints. On the frontier, though, morphine was expensive and hard to obtain in quantity.
Its older and cheaper cousin, opium, filled the gap. Opium arrived in the West with the thousands of Chinese immigrants who came during the Gold Rush to work in the mines and on the railroads, and the habit gradually spread outward from there. For a time, it went entirely unregulated. Opium dens did exist, and even Billy the Kid’s brother Joseph was said to frequent them in Silver City.
But stories of Wild Bill Hickok using opium appear to have no basis in the historical record. The rumor seems to have originated in Pete Dexter’s 1986 novel Deadwood, which later inspired the Jeff Bridges film Wild Bill. Hickok enjoyed gambling and drinking, but there is no contemporary evidence that he used opium. Likewise, the famous scene in Tombstone where Curly Bill Brocius stumbles out of an opium den and shoots Marshal White is almost entirely fictional.
The real Brocius did kill the marshal, but every contemporary account, including testimony from Wyatt Earp, described him as drunk, not high. The most common way frontier people consumed opium was through laudanum, simply opium dissolved in alcohol and flavored with syrup to mask the bitterness. It became the cure-all of the nineteenth century, prescribed for toothaches, headaches, menstrual cramps, diarrhea, snakebites, gunshot wounds, teething babies, and female complaints. It was cheap and everywhere, but it built tolerance quickly, and users needed ever larger doses for the same relief.
It was also one of the most common methods of suicide, particularly among sex workers. A lethal dose of laudanum killed Wyatt Earp’s common-law wife, Mattie Blaylock. Yet laudanum did not discriminate. It ran through every layer of frontier society.
The great Kit Carson used it, though he was dying at the time, and his doctor eventually dosed him with chloroform when it was no longer enough. Doc Holliday, in his final years, self-medicated with laudanum alongside his whiskey. The first real crackdowns on drugs came not from the federal government but from local authorities, and they were not motivated by public health. Virginia City banned opium dens in September 1876 and even made it illegal to possess a pipe.
But enforcement was selective. As long as opium use remained confined to Chinese laborers, authorities did not care. The crackdown came only when white people, especially white women, began appearing in the dens. It was not the opium that frightened the authorities but who was using it and who they were lying beside.
Even then, opium itself remained legal at the drugstore. The law only outlawed the Chinese way of consuming it, while laudanum stayed on the shelf, no questions asked. Around that same period, drugstores began stocking another miracle of modern science: cocaine. First isolated from the coca leaf around 1860, it was being marketed across the United States by the 1880s as a cure for melancholy, fatigue, indigestion, and asthma.
Some even believed it could cure morphine addiction. It appeared in lozenges, tonics, wine, and kits that came with their own syringes. There were even cocaine toothache drops marketed specifically for children. But cocaine was a late arrival on the frontier.
By the time it was truly widespread in the late 1890s and early 1900s, the frontier was already disappearing. There are no famous Westerners documented as regular cocaine users, though Ulysses S. Grant was given strong doses by his doctor during his final months of throat cancer so he could keep writing his memoirs. He finished the book just days before his death, so one of the most celebrated works in American history was completed with the assistance of cocaine.
The stories about cocaine in Coca-Cola are true. The drink was invented in 1886 by John Pemberton, an Atlanta pharmacist who had served in the Confederate Army and was badly wounded at the Battle of Columbus. Like so many wounded veterans, he emerged addicted to morphine, and his original product was a cocaine wine he pursued as an alternative. When temperance laws hit Atlanta, he removed the alcohol and replaced it with sugar syrup.
The early batches did contain cocaine, though not much, and trace amounts reportedly remained until around 1929. As for cannabis, did cowboys smoke weed? Probably not. It was available and legal, sold in pharmacies as tinctures and extracts for migraines and insomnia as early as the 1850s, so a cowboy in 1875 could certainly have gotten cannabis into his system.
But the actual practice of smoking marijuana did not arrive until the turn of the century, concentrated along the border with Mexico. The colorful stories of wild weed growing across the frontier and cowboys passing joints from Texas to Montana have no evidence behind them. There are no diaries, letters, or arrest records to support widespread use. Eating hashish was a different matter.
A New York company called the Gunjah Wallah Company sold hash candy through mail-order newspaper ads, billing it as a harmless and pleasurable stimulant. The writer Fitz Ludlow became famous in 1857 for a book about his experiences with cannabis extract, and in 1863 he crossed the Great Plains all the way to California. So while no specific cowboy can be proven to have eaten hash candy around a campfire, at least one dedicated cannabis enthusiast rode the trail west. The best-documented user of a mind-altering substance in the Old West was Quanah Parker, the last great war chief of the Comanche.
Peyote, a small cactus native to the Southwest, had been used in ceremonies in Mexico for thousands of years. Over the second half of the nineteenth century, the practice spread north onto the Southern Plains, passing from tribe to tribe until it reached the Comanches and Kiowas. Quanah Parker, the son of war chief Peta Nocona and white captive Cynthia Ann Parker, surrendered in 1875 and reinvented himself as a businessman and rancher. He also became the most prominent advocate of peyote in the United States, testifying against anti-peyote legislation and helping shape the movement that would later be formally organized as the Native American Church.
He is credited with the remark, “The white man goes into his church and talks about Jesus. The Indian goes into his teepee and talks to Jesus. ” For the Comanche, peyote was not recreational. It was medicine and religion combined.
By the late 1890s, there was one more substance worth noting. The Bayer Pharmaceutical company introduced a new product that promised not only to soothe coughs but to cure morphine addiction. They recommended it even for children and named it after the German word for heroic, because of the feeling it gave test subjects. It was heroin.
A cough syrup marketed as a safe, non-addictive substitute for morphine. For all the substances available, however, there was surprisingly little recreational drug use on the frontier itself. The paper trail is long, with contemporary descriptions of opium dens, laudanum overdoses, city ordinances regulating drugs as early as the 1870s, and advertisements for cocaine toothache drops. But the frontier’s true drug of choice was simply whiskey.
There is a difference between what was available and what was actually used. A cowboy could have bought cannabis at a drugstore in the 1870s, but the evidence suggests most of them never did. The Old West was drenched in alcohol and haunted by opium, but it was no landscape of casual marijuana smokers.
The reality, as always, was more mundane, and in many ways more tragic.