The shot glass slid down the bar, the dusty gunfighter threw back one last drink before the big showdown, and the dark interior of a Tombstone saloon did its best to live up to every movie ever made about the Old West. The whiskey part was never far off from reality. But the bottle in the gunfighter’s hand was only the most visible substance on a shelf that held far stranger remedies. In the 1870s, a man could stroll into a drugstore in a place like Tombstone and walk out with an arsenal of intoxicants that would land him in federal prison a century later.

Opium, morphine, cocaine, cannabis. All of it legal, all of it over the counter, sitting right there next to the soap and the horse liniment. Morphine came first. It had been isolated from the opium poppy by a German pharmacist in the early 1800s, and within a couple of decades it was being commercially manufactured and marketed to the public.

It was a hell of a painkiller, and it was also one of the most addictive substances on Earth. The 1850s made it worse with a brand new invention, the hypodermic syringe. Once doctors figured out how to inject a precise dose straight into the bloodstream, morphine became the go-to painkiller for everyone from battlefield surgeons to frontier sawbones. Some doctors even believed that injecting the drug was less habit-forming than swallowing it, on the theory that bypassing the appetite somehow spared the patient the craving.

The Civil War supposedly produced an entire generation of morphine addicts, a condition often called the soldiers’ disease. There is some truth to that. Surgeons handed out opiates like candy, and some of those boys did come home addicted. But the scale was nowhere near what many sources claim.

The term soldiers’ disease barely appears in contemporary documents, and historians who have studied nineteenth-century addiction, men like David Courtwright, found that the claims of hundreds of thousands of addicted veterans were almost certainly exaggerated. The typical opiate addict of the nineteenth century was not a veteran at all. She was a middle-aged, middle-class white woman hooked by her own physician, who had prescribed opium-based medicines for everything from cramps to nervous complaints. The problem was that opium was expensive and hard to come by in quantity on the frontier, which left the door wide open for morphine’s older and cheaper cousin.

Opium arrived out west around the same time as the Gold Rush, carried by the thousands of Chinese immigrants who labored for the mines and railroads. From there the habit spread slowly outward to the general population. For a while it went almost completely unregulated. You could buy it, sell it, smoke it, even drink it.

The opium dens of the movies absolutely existed. The films set in Tombstone and the ones that borrowed from McCabe & Mrs. Miller got that part right. Even Billy the Kid’s brother, Joseph, was said to frequent opium dens back in Silver City.

As for Wild Bill Hickok, the rumors have circulated for years, but no primary source backs them up. The idea appears to have originated with Pete Dexter’s 1986 novel Deadwood, which along with the screenplay inspired the movie Wild Bill starring Jeff Bridges. Great movie, but not a documentary. The historical record shows that Hickok enjoyed gambling and drinking, but there is no contemporary evidence that he used opium.

Then there’s the famous scene in Tombstone where Curly Bill staggered out of an opium den and gunned down Marshal White. Cool scene, almost completely fictional. The real Curly Bill did indeed kill the marshal, but every contemporary account, including testimony from Wyatt Earp, described Brocius as drunk, not high. Nothing in the records indicates that he used opium.

The most common way people on the frontier consumed opium was through laudanum. That was what John Wayne drank in The Shootist, and what Alma Garrett sipped while staring out the window in the HBO series Deadwood. Laudanum was simply opium dissolved in alcohol, usually flavored with some type of 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 those ailments politely referred to as female complaints. It was cheap, it was everywhere, and it built a tolerance fast, forcing users to need bigger and bigger doses just to get the same relief. On a darker note, it was one of the most common methods of suicide, especially among the soiled doves. 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 up to some of the most celebrated names in the Old West. The great Kit Carson used it, though he was dying at the time, so it was hardly recreational. When the laudanum was no longer enough, his doctor dosed him with chloroform.

Doc Holliday spent his final years self-medicating with laudanum in addition to the whiskey. The letters and reminiscences of the frontier are full of such names, men who reached for the bottle of tincture when the pain or the memories got to be too much. With all these substances floating around, the law eventually got involved. There is an assumption that nothing was regulated until the twentieth century, when the federal government stuck its head in.

In reality, the first real crackdowns came much earlier, and they came at the local level. Virginia City banned opium dens in September of 1876, even making it illegal to possess a pipe. But these laws were not really about public health, at least not in the way one might think. The enforcement was extremely selective.

As long as opium use remained confined to the Chinese laborers, the authorities did not care. What finally triggered the crackdown was when white people, especially white women, began showing up in those same dens and taking up the pipe. It was not the opium that scared the authorities, it was who the users were lying next to while they smoked it. And even then, opium itself remained legal at the drugstores.

All they outlawed was the Chinese way of consuming it. Laudanum stayed right there on the shelf, no questions asked. Around that same period, drugstores were stocking up on another miracle of modern science. Cocaine was first isolated from the coca leaf around 1860, and by the 1880s it was being marketed across the United States as a genuine miracle.

It was billed as a cure for melancholy, fatigue, indigestion, asthma, and, almost unbelievably, as a cure for morphine addiction, basically trading one monkey for another. It was in everything. Cocaine lozenges, cocaine tonics, cocaine wine. Some pharmaceutical companies sold handy little kits that came with their own syringes.

There were even cocaine toothache drops marketed specifically for children. As far as how widespread the use was on the frontier, cocaine was sort of a late arrival. By the time it was truly everywhere, the late 1890s and early 1900s, the frontier was already getting ready to close up shop. No famous Westerners are known to have used it.

Thomas Edison allegedly drank cocaine wine, and so did Pope Leo XIII. The best example with even a loose Old West connection was Ulysses S. Grant, and even then, it was only during his last few months as he suffered from throat cancer. His doctor gave him strong enough doses to dull the pain so he could keep writing his book.

He finished it just days before his death. One of the most celebrated works in American history was completed with the assistance of cocaine. The stories about cocaine being in Coca-Cola are true. The drink was invented in 1886 by an Atlanta pharmacist named John Pemberton.

He had served in the Confederate Army and was slashed up pretty badly during the Battle of Columbus, and like so many other wounded veterans, he came out the other side 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 the temperance laws hit Atlanta, he pulled out the alcohol and replaced it with a sugar syrup. Just like that, 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 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. Even 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 certainly have gotten cannabis into his system, legally and over the counter. But the actual practice of smoking marijuana did not come about until the turn of the century, and even then, it was mostly along the border with Mexico. The stories about it growing wild and cowboys using it as a substitute for tobacco have little evidence behind them. No diaries, no letters, no arrest records.

Eating it was an entirely different matter, kind of. A company out of New York called 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 called 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.

It cannot be proven that any cowboys ever ate hash candy around a campfire, but at least one certified weed enthusiast absolutely rode the trail west. There was one more substance worth discussing, and unlike cocaine and marijuana, this one was used by a very famous frontier figure. Peyote. The tiny little cactus grows in the Southwest, and when consumed, it can produce very powerful visions.

The native peoples of Mexico had been using 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 finally reached the Comanches and Kiowas. That was where Quanah Parker entered the picture. The son of Comanche war chief Peta Nocona and a white captive named Cynthia Ann Parker, Quanah was himself considered 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. Somewhere along the way, he became the single most prominent advocate of peyote in the United States. He spent the rest of his life practicing and defending it, testifying against anti-peyote legislation and helping to 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, he said. 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 if the question was 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 then there was the grand finale. By the 1890s, if none of the available substances were working, if the cocaine wine had failed and the laudanum had lost its edge, there was one more option. The Bayer Pharmaceutical Company, in 1898, introduced a brand 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 their new miracle compound that they named it after the German word heroisch, heroic, on account of the feeling it gave the test subjects. Nowadays it is called heroin. Grandma’s cough syrup was heroin.

Baby’s teething drops were cocaine. And the entire family washed 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 whiskey.

There is plenty of stuff online claiming that weed grew wild all across the frontier and cowboys passed joints from Texas up to Montana. It makes for a great story, but there is just no evidence of widespread use. No diaries, no letters, no arrest records. There are contemporary sources describing opium dens and laudanum overdoses.

There are city ordinances and state laws regulating dope as early as the 1870s. There are ads for cocaine toothache drops. The paper trail as far as frontier drug use is a mile long. But cowboys smoking weed, there is really 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. Most of them never did, at least not according to the evidence.