What was sherlock holmes addicted to

His favorites were burgundies, especially Montrachet and Meursault. But nowhere in the writings of Arthur Conan Doyle was it ever suggested that Holmes was compromised by drinking alcohol or that his behavior would be considered that of an alcoholic. In Victorian England, tobacco smoking by a variety of means was quite common. The British became fond of cigarettes after the Crimean War, and by the end of the nineteenth century, Britain was a smoking nation.

Holmes was a compulsive smoker and in that sense was addicted. He smoked cigars, cigarettes, and preferably pipes. The pipes, along with his deer-stalker hat, comprised his signature silhouette. Smoking, although a distasteful habit, would not be considered an addiction by many readers. The origins of cocaine began centuries ago.

The Incas of Columbia, Peru, and Bolivia chewed the coca leaf for thousands of years. They used cocaine for mystical, religious, social, and medicinal purposes. Coca leaves made their way to Europe and were a legal drug in England. It was widely used by physicians in Britain to treat a variety of maladies.

To appreciate the milieu in which Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, it is important to recognize that on both sides of the Atlantic narcotics and cocaine were used with and without medical supervision and without any stigma. There is no convincing evidence that he was ever a user of cocaine himself.

Would you care to try it? However, in none of his writings does Conan Doyle offer an explanation as to when or why Holmes began to use cocaine. The author only observed that the detective did not use it when working on a case and only to dispel boredom when he had nothing to do. Conan Doyle at least suggests the possibility that Holmes also had an opioid habit. However, Holmes assures Watson that he does not indulge in opium-smoking, but only purchased opium as part of an undercover investigation.

Remember that I speak not only as one comrade to another, but as a medical man. Since he first entered the literary world, Holmes has been the subject of many adaptations. The movie series starring Robert Downey Jr.

In this case, the choice of an actor with his own struggles with drug abuse may not have been coincidental, but also may be the reason that the movie version of Holmes does not dabble in drugs.

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The correspondent's reply is in the negative on the following grounds. In the first place, Holmes was a man of immense mental resource and initiative, being an expert chemist, an accomplished linguist, an assiduous student of Black Letter texts, a capable performer on the violin, a composer and an authority on medieval music. Nor was he of the stuff of which cocaine addicts are made, who are sociable, lacking in mental capacity and need the stimulus of a drug to rouse their interest in life.

The continued use of cocaine leads to physical, mental and moral degeneration. Holmes, on the other hand, was the most unsociable of men and showed no deterioration in his mental powers, physical activity or character.

The correspondent suggests that Holmes was playing a trick on Watson when he pretended to give himself an injection of cocaine and showed an arm dotted and scarred with numerous puncture marks.