Cocaine and the Night: The Social Life of a Drug in Rio de Janeiro during Brazil’s First Republic, 1885–1920s

Abstract

When cocaine became a pharmaceutical product in the middle of the 1880s, its clinical use as a local anesthetic made it valuable for medical professionals. This was how the alkaloid was introduced into the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro—as a widely available, cheap, and efficient treatment for toothache. This article explores how cocaine became integrated into nonmedical aspects of Rio’s social life by actors in various walks of life, for a variety of purposes. Cocaine contributed to new forms of pleasure seeking and economic benefit in a postslavery, modernizing city landscape, as nightlife developed new vocabularies, gestures, emotions, and hazards around the drug’s sales and use—chronicled by a new generation of journalists, storytellers, and law enforcement officials. Ultimately, I argue, cocaine played a notable role in expanding the spatial and temporal frontiers of the city’s social fabric, especially its nightlife, at the turn of the twentieth century.