An alarming new "dope" fad was sweeping through Spokane in 1906, according to a pharmacist on Howard Street.

"`Wideawake' Is All The Rage," blared a headline in the Jan. 28, 1906 Spokesman-Review.

"The fiends call cocaine or coke 'wideawake'," said the pharmacist. "They say that by using it they can stay awake all night ... There is nothing that these dope fiends will not do to get their drug."

Yet getting it was simple enough. They merely had to walk into the druggist's shop with some cash.

Here's how a reporter described the scene in the druggist's shop:

"'Gimme a dollar's worth of wideawake,' said a tall cadaverous-looking individual.
"... When the druggist returned from the rear of the store, he grabbed the bottle from his hand, flung down a dollar and slunk out of the store."

Obviously, cocaine was legal. It could be purchased without a prescription. It was becoming so popular that the druggist said it was beginning to supplant his previous big sellers: Gum opium and morphine. Yet the druggist had no illusions about these drugs -- he knew they were trouble.

"You would not believe how many of these fiends there are until you had worked here night after night, as I do," the druggist was quoted as saying. "There seems to be no particular class of people who use the drugs. They come from all ranks of society. Very many sink to the lowest levels from the use of narcotics. Men and women, blacks and whites, use dope in equal numbers. Once they become addicted to the use of drugs, very few quit it."

As if to illustrate his point, the S-R ran another story that week about a Pine City man who had been brought to Colfax by his brother for urgent medical treatment.
"He is a morphine fiend and a complete wreck," wrote a Colfax correspondent. "He is perfectly helpless and almost idiotic. He can scarcely walk and cannot dress or feed himself. An effort will be made to have him committed to the asylum at Medical Lake."

So let me throw out a couple of questions:

Are you surprised at the extent of the narcotic trade in 1906 Spokane?

And are you surprised it took another eight years -- until 1914 -- for cocaine to be banned by federal law?

Nothing new under the sun, as they say. Sex, drugs, political corruption, warmongering. History will teach us nothing.

"Are you surprised at the extent of the narcotic trade in 1906 Spokane?"

With respect to cocaine, the only surprise is that it took as long as 1906 to become popular. It was widely available, used and touted by well respected public figures in the late 1800's. It was an ingredient in Coca Cola until 1903.