In the silver boomtown of Tombstone, in the 1870s, a man could walk into a drugstore and, for the price of a few coins, walk out with an arsenal that would put him in a federal prison today. Opium, morphine, cocaine, cannabis—all sitting on the shelf right next to the soap and horse liniment, all perfectly legal, all available over the counter. The dusty gunfighter throwing back a final whiskey before the showdown is the image history remembers, but the reality was far stranger: the Old West was awash in intoxicants, and the drugstore, not the saloon, was often the source. That morphine was the root of nearly every other substance on the frontier’s pharmacy shelf is a fact that begins with a German pharmacist in the early 1800s, who first isolated it from the opium poppy.
Within a couple of decades, it was being commercially manufactured and marketed to the public, and for good reason—it was a hell of a painkiller. Unfortunately, it was also one of the most addictive substances on Earth. That addiction problem became infinitely worse in the 1850s with the invention of the hypodermic syringe. Once doctors figured out how to inject a precise dose straight into the bloodstream, morphine became the go-to remedy for everyone from battlefield surgeons to frontier sawbones.
Some physicians even believed that injecting the drug was less habit-forming than swallowing it, on the theory that bypassing the appetite somehow avoided the dependence. The Civil War, so the story goes, produced an entire generation of morphine addicts, a condition sometimes called “the soldiers’ disease. ” There is truth in that: surgeons did hand out opiates like candy, and some boys did come home addicted. But the scale was nowhere near what popular sources claim.
Historians who have actually studied nineteenth-century addiction, such as David Courtwright, found that the stories of hundreds of thousands of addicted veterans were almost certainly exaggerated. The typical opiate addict of the era was not a veteran at all. It was a middle-aged, middle-class white woman, hooked by her own physician, who prescribed opium-based medicines for everything from cramps to “nervous complaints. ” The only problem was that opium-based medicines were expensive and hard to come by in quantity on the frontier, leaving the door wide open for morphine’s older and cheaper cousin.
Opium arrived in the West around the same time as the Gold Rush, carried by thousands of Chinese immigrants who labored in the mines and on the railroads. The habit slowly spread outward from there to the general population, and for a while it went almost completely unregulated. You could buy it, sell it, smoke it, even drink it. Opium dens—the kind seen in films like Tombstone and McCabe & Mrs.
Miller—absolutely existed. Even Billy the Kid’s brother, Joseph, was said to frequent the dens of Silver City. But not every famous name deserves the association. The rumors that Wild Bill Hickok used opium appear to trace back to Pete Dexter’s 1986 novel Deadwood, which in turn inspired the movie Wild Bill starring Jeff Bridges.
A great film, but not a documentary. The historical record shows that Hickok enjoyed gambling and drinking, but there is no contemporary evidence he ever used opium. And as for that famous scene in Tombstone, where Curly Bill Brocius staggers out of an opium den and guns down Marshal White—it is almost completely fictional. The real Curly Bill did indeed kill the marshal, but every contemporary account, including testimony from Wyatt Earp, describes Brocius as drunk, not high.
The most common way frontier folk consumed opium was through laudanum—the concoction John Wayne drinks in The Shootist, the same amber bottle Alma Garrett sips from while staring out the window in the HBO series Deadwood. Laudanum was nothing more than opium dissolved in alcohol, usually flavored with syrup to cut the bitterness. It became the cure-all of the nineteenth century. Doctors prescribed it for toothaches, headaches, menstrual cramps, diarrhea, snake bites, gunshot wounds, teething babies, and even a complaints they politely labeled “female complaints.
” It was cheap, it was everywhere, and it built tolerance fast, so users needed bigger and bigger doses for the same relief. On a darker note, laudanum was also one of the most common methods of suicide, especially among the “soiled doves” of the frontier. It was a lethal dose of laudanum that killed Wyatt Earp’s common-law wife, Mattie Blaylock. Laudanum did not discriminate.
That little bottle ran through every layer of frontier society, from the poorest crib girls to the most celebrated names of the Old West. Even Kit Carson used it, though he was dying at the time and took it more for relief than recreation—and when that was no longer enough, his doctor dosed him with chloroform. Old friend Doc Holliday also spent his final years self-medicating with laudanum alongside his whiskey. Given how much of this stuff floated around, one wonders when the law finally got involved.
The assumption is that none of these substances were regulated until the twentieth century, when the federal government stepped in—but the first real crackdowns came much earlier, at the local level. Virginia City banned opium dens in September 1876, going so far as to make possessing a pipe illegal. But these laws were not really about public health, at least not in the way one might think. Enforcement was extremely selective.
As long as opium use remained confined to Chinese laborers, the authorities did not care. The crackdown came only when white people—especially white women—began showing up in those same dens, taking up the pipe. It was not the opium that scared the authorities so much as who was using it, and who they were lying next to while they did. Even then, opium itself was never banned, only the Chinese way of consuming it.
Laudanum stayed right on the shelf, no questions asked. Around that same period, drugstores began stocking yet another miracle of modern science: cocaine. First isolated from the coca leaf around 1860, by the 1880s it was being marketed across the United States as a genuine cure for melancholy, fatigue, indigestion, and asthma—and, unbelievably, as a cure for morphine addiction. Basically trading one monkey for another.
Cocaine was in everything: lozenges, tonics, wine, and even handy kits sold with their own syringes. There were cocaine toothache drops marketed specifically for children. But as far as the frontier, cocaine was something of a late arrival. By the time it was truly everywhere, in the late 1890s and early 1900s, the frontier was already closing up shop.
No famous Westerners can be tied to its use. Thomas Edison allegedly drank cocaine wine, and so did Pope Leo XIII, but the best example that is at least Old West adjacent is Ulysses S. Grant, and even then only during his last few months as he suffered from throat cancer. His doctor gave him doses strong enough to dull the pain so he could keep writing his memoirs.
He finished the book just days before his death, which means one of the most celebrated works in American history was completed with the assistance of cocaine. Cocaine also birthed a beverage that would outlive the frontier itself. The stories about the drug being in Coca-Cola are true. Coke was invented in 1886 by an Atlanta pharmacist named John Pemberton.
Pemberton had served in the Confederate Army and was badly wounded during the Battle of Columbus. Like so many other wounded veterans, he emerged addicted to morphine. His original product was a cocaine wine, and part of what he was chasing, both as a businessman and reportedly for his own habit, was an alternative to morphine. When temperance laws hit Atlanta, he removed the alcohol and replaced it with sugar syrup.
Coca-Cola was born. Those early batches did contain cocaine, though not very much. The company began phasing it out around the turn of the century, but trace amounts reportedly remained until around 1929. What about cannabis?
Did cowboys smoke weed? Probably not. Some might have eaten it, but even that was relatively rare, at least during the nineteenth century. It was available and it was legal.
As early as the 1850s, it could be found in pharmacies in the form of tinctures and extracts, prescribed for everything from migraines to insomnia. A cowboy in 1875 could have legally purchased cannabis over the counter and gotten it into his system. But the actual practice of smoking it did not come about until the turn of the century, mostly along the border with Mexico. The stories of it growing wild out west, with cowboys using it as a stand-in for tobacco, have little evidence to support them.
Eating the stuff was another matter. A company out of New York, the Gunjah Wallah Company, sold hash candy through mail-order newspaper ads, billing it as a harmless and pleasurable stimulant. A writer named Fitz Ludlow became famous in 1857 for a book titled The Hashish Eater, all about his own experiences gobbling down cannabis extract. Just a few years later, in 1863, Ludlow crossed the Great Plains all the way to California.
So while no one can prove any cowboy ate hash candy around a campfire, at least one certified weed enthusiast rode the trail west. Unlike cocaine and marijuana, one substance connected to the frontier is far better documented, and its most famous promoter was none other than Quanah Parker—the same peyote that the boys in Young Guns were on when Dirty Steve saw that giant chicken. Peyote is a tiny cactus that grows in the Southwest, and when consumed it can produce powerful visions. Native peoples of Mexico had used it in ceremonies for thousands of years.
Over the second half of the nineteenth century, the practice spread north onto the Southern Great Plains, passing from tribe to tribe until it reached the Comanches and Kiowas. That is where Quanah Parker enters the picture. Son of Comanche war chief Peta Nocona and the white captive Cynthia Ann Parker, Quanah was the last great war chief of the Comanche. After surrendering in 1875, he reinvented himself as a businessman and rancher, arguably becoming one of the most influential Native Americans of his generation.
He also became the single most prominent advocate of peyote in the United States, spending the rest of his life practicing and defending it, testifying against anti-peyote legislation and helping shape the movement that after his death would be formally organized as the Native American Church. He is credited with one of the all-time great quotes on the subject: “The white man goes into his church and talks about Jesus. The Indian goes into his teepee and talks to Jesus. ” Peyote was not really a recreational drug—for the Comanche and other Plains tribes, it was medicine and religion rolled into one.
But when asking which famous Westerners were actually using mind-altering substances, the best documented user of psychedelics in the entire Old West also happened to be the last war chief of the Comanche. And if all of the above failed to do the trick, there was one final miracle waiting in the wings. In 1898, the Bayer Pharmaceutical company introduced a new product that promised not only to soothe a cough, but to cure a pesky morphine addiction. It was a cough syrup marketed as a safe, non-addictive substitute for morphine, recommended even for children.
Bayer was so proud of the compound that they named it after the German word “heroisch”—heroic—for the feeling it gave test subjects. Today we call it heroin. Grandma’s cough syrup was heroin. Baby’s teething drops were cocaine.
And the entire family might wash down supper with a nice glass of wine-flavored speedball. But as far as the Old West specifically, outside of laudanum and opium dens, there really does not appear to have been all that much recreational drug use. The frontier’s true drug of choice was simply whiskey. Despite the stories online of weed growing wild across the frontier and cowboys passing joints from Texas to Montana, there is no evidence of widespread use—no diaries, no letters, no arrest records.
Contemporary sources describe opium dens and laudanum overdoses. City ordinances and state laws regulating dope existed as early as the 1870s. There are ads for cocaine toothache drops. The paper trail is a mile long.
But cowboys smoking weed? There is just nothing out there. 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, absolutely.
Did most of them ever do that? Not according to the evidence.
