Cooking heroin or “dope”
15 November 2023
Dope has a variety of meanings. The ones I’m going to consider here all, with one exception, originally come from a sense of a thick, viscous liquid. The word’s origin is uncertain. It could be variation on daub, originally referring to a plaster used in construction, but later used to refer to various viscous substances like lubricants. Or it may be a borrowing from the Dutch doop, meaning sauce.
The use of dope, referring to a sauce or gravy, dates to the early nineteenth century. It’s first recorded in the writing of Washington Irving, who clearly thought it came from the Dutch. Here is Irving proffering a specious etymology for the name of Philadelphia in his Salmagundi #10 of 16 May 1807:
According to the good old rule, I shall begin with the etymology of its name, which, according to Linkum Fidelius, Tom. LV, is clearly derived, either from the name of its first founder, viz. PHILO DRIPPING-PAN,* or the singular taste of the aborigines who flourished there on his arrival. Linkum, who is as shrewd a fellow as any theorist or F. S. A. for peeping with a dark lantern into the lumber-garret of antiquity, and lugging out all the trash which was left there for oblivion by our wiser ancestors, supports his opinion by a prodigious number of ingenious and inapplicable arguments; but particularly rests his position on the known fact, that Philo Dripping-pan was remarkable for his predilection to eating, and his love of what the learned Dutch call doup. Our erudite author likewise observes that the citizens are to this day noted for their love of “a sop in the pan,” and their portly appearance, “except, indeed,” continues he, “the young ladies, who are perfectly genteel in their dimensions”—this, however, he ill-naturedly enough attributes to their eating pickles, and drinking vinegar.
* I defy any travel monger to excel friend Jeremy in forcing a derivation.
The sense of dope meaning drugs comes out of this sense of a viscous liquid, with opiates and other such substances often consumed in a liquid form. The earliest use of dope to refer to drugs, that I’m aware of is from Ohio’s Ashtabula Weekly Telegraph of 4 December 1858. The article in question contains a transcript from a murder trial. In this passage, a defense witness is testifying as to why the defendant would legitimately have the toxic substance on hand:
He came to my house frequently—came with a horse and buggy; think he visited there oftener when his wife was there than when she was not; think one horse he called Tiger, another Charlie; think I learned something of his giving dope to his horses about the time he moved from Garrettsville to Chagrin Falls—gave some to Charlie horse.
And the specific sense of an opiate dates to at least 20 May 1883, when this appeared in the pages of the New York Sun:
It would be very fine if you could float off into space to invisible music, see Spanish castles in thick clouds of blue smoke, or think yourself in a land of purple daisies and blue-eyed sirens. Education was not neglected in our family, and they say I don’t lack imagination; but I never got any such effect from smoking “dope” (opium).
Pennsylvania’s Juniata Sentinel and Republican of 3 November 1897 has this story that mentions how prospectors in the Klondike, taking a myth about jimson weed to heart, would dope up their children in the hope that the tots would lead them to gold. Not only is the myth ludicrous, but I have my doubts about Klondikers ever doing this, but regardless of the veracity of the story, it’s good evidence of the word’s usage:
The lowly jimson weed belongs to a family not only interesting, but of great importance from an economic point of view. The Jamestown weed is only another species of the plant from which the priests of Apollo mad a decoction to induce that state of ecstasy in keeping with the prophetic character of their revelations. Tonga is drink made from the seeds which the Indians of Darien give to their children that they may discover the location of gold. Klondikers might take a baby along and a few jimson weed seeds to make tea, and when the baby has its “dope” and falls down, there daddy could dig, sure of a find.
Dope could refer to any type of adulterant, not just to medicine or drugs. There is this from the Chicago Daily Tribune of 24 December 1872 that sounds a lot like the health info peddled by present-day internet “influencers”:
It is his chief delight to concern himself with what we eat and drink, and, just as we flatter ourselves that we have got a good dinner on the table and sit down to enjoy it, he bounds in like a harlequin and bids us beware of the sugar, for it is full of flour and sand; of the pickles, for they have been soused in muriatic acid and are colored with arsenic; of the biscuits, for they have been raised with some chemical abomination; of the milk for it is compounded of dope; and so on, to the end of the chapter; and thus succeeds in spoiling our dinner, without telling us how or where we can get pure articles.
The sense of dope meaning information also arises from the drug sense, but in this case it comes out of horse racing and the knowledge of which horses had been administered performance-enhancing drugs. We see the information sense, in the context of horse racing, by the end of the nineteenth century. From Frank Hutcheson’s 1896 The Barkeep Stories:
“Why didn’t you send me dat getaway money I staked you to last spring? Been too busy figurin’ dope an’ countin’ money t’ t’ink o’ trifles, I s’pose?”
“Well, on de square, I was goin’ ——"
“You was goin’ t’ send it w’en you beat a ten to one shot wid a fifty-dollar not, I s’pose—but you took a chance an’ bet de hull works on a t’ree-to-five shot, and—de lamp wen out. Youse guys make me sick! Blow back t’ town after bein’ round de race-tracks all summer wid a paper suit an’ a screwy overcoat an’ a pair o’ yellow shoes an’ stand round an’ look wise an’ tell bout how you come near ownin’ dat black filly dat just win de stake down east, an’ how if dis one could have win you’d be makin’ book now, an’ a few more smoke-up stories.”
That’s it. A viscous liquid eventually gave rise to inside information.
But the sense of a dope meaning someone who is foolish or stupid has a very different origin. That sense arises in the dialect of Cumberland, England, where it is recorded as early as 1851.
Sources:
“Adulterations.” Chicago Daily Tribune, 24 December 1872, 4/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Bostwick, C. B. “Trial of Hiram Cole for Murder.” Ashtabula Weekly Telegraph (Ohio), 4 December 1858. 1/7. Newspapers.com.
Glossary of Provincial Words Used in the County of Cumberland. London: John Gray Bell, 1851, 8. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. dope, n.1, dope, n.2, dope, n.3, dope, adj.1, dope, v.1. Green’s contains an 1859 citation for dope as medicine, but this is erroneous. The reference is to a 1959 issue of the Waukesha, Wisconsin Freeman which celebrates the centennial of the town. The passage in question is from a WWI-era remembrance of one of the town’s early doctors. NewspaperArchive.com’s metadata incorrectly lists this 1959 issue as being from 1859.
Hutcheson, Frank. The Barkeep Stories. Chicago: E.A. Weeks, 1896, 6–7. Internet Archive.
“An Interesting Family.” Juniata Sentinel and Republican (Mifflintown, Pennsylvania), 3 November 1897, 4/3. Library of Congress: Chronicling America, Historic American Newspapers.
Irving, Washington (pseud. Launcelot Langstaff). Salmagundi, 10, 16 May 1807. In Salmagundi, vol. 1 of 2. New York: D. Longworth, 1808, 199–200. Google Books.
“Opium Smoking.” The Sun (New York), 20 May 1883, 2/7. NewspaperArchive.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. dope, v., dope n., doping, n., daub, n.; third edition, December 2001, dope, adj.
Image credit: Psychonaught, 2010. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.