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# What the antiques market sells as cocaine boxes and when cocaine became fashionable
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/neredko-govoria-o-zaniatnykh-bezdelitsakh-proshlogo-upominaiut-kokainnitsy-i-ikh-sushchestvovanie-malo-udivliaet-mol-chem-tolko-liudi-v-starinu-ne-razvlekalis/
- Published: 2018-06-14T18:05:40.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-02T19:09:45.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: In the Press, Books, Observations, Mores

Talking of the curious trifles of the past, people often mention cocaine boxes, and their existence surprises hardly anyone: well, what did folk not amuse themselves with in the old days. But if one looks into it, the end of the nineteenth century, say its second half, was nevertheless marked by a fashion for morphine. Anna Karenina was a morphine addict, and Tennessee Williams mentions morphine too. People of the time took other intoxicating substances as well: the fashion for various narcotics is supported by reports such as that Queen Victoria was prescribed chloroform for the birth of her last child.

Cocaine is quite another matter. It gained popularity later, and its roots lie in Western Europe. In Russia the heyday of "cocaine culture" fell rather in the 1920s and 1930s. A great deal is said about it in fiction: in the early Fadeyev, in Vsevolod Ivanov, Leonid Leonov, Kataev, Andrey Sobol. Who did not describe it. Konstantin Vaginov was fond of cocaine and wrote about it. M. Ageyev wrote "Novel with Cocaine". In "How the Steel Was Tempered" there is a picturesque episode in which the hero meets a Polish acquaintance on a train and, from the way "her nostrils quivered", recognises her ruinous habit. At that moment comes the remarkable line: "You'll die of cocaine all the same."

Since a passion for cocaine was not encouraged, it was secret, censured and prosecuted by law: in the Greek dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas, in France, and in Soviet Russia alike. So, I think, there can be no question of mass production of implements and accessories for the use of cocaine.

What, then, is a cocaine box? The very word "cocaine box" (kokainnitsa) has never come my way in literature and at first glance looks like a modern coinage. Yet what comes to mind are the small metal cases that abound in antique shops and on forums; sellers often label them as boxes for cocaine. And what do you yourselves think: is a box a convenient place to keep cocaine? Even one of precious metal? Evidently it is not the best way to carry so finely ground a powder. How would you use it? Tip the whole box out onto the table? One might recall the modern interpretation of the cocaine box: a screw-top vial with a small spoon. I have not come across such antique pieces. What the market passes off as cocaine boxes are ordinary pill boxes, caskets for small jewels, cosmetic cases, snuffboxes and other decorative little boxes. Naturally, someone may well have poured cocaine into them. In Ettore Scola's film "Le Bal", about the life of French society, in one of the first scenes a man in a tailcoat tips cocaine onto the table; he uses a flat cocaine box of the cigarette-case type, and such pieces have never caught my eye in the antiques trade. One may recall the widely reproduced photographs of Victorian chemists' jars labelled "Cocaine": indeed, the drug would most conveniently have been kept in glass containers rather than in the easily opened metal cases that are usually passed off as cocaine boxes.

As for the deliberate manufacture of jewelled receptacles for cocaine, these were certainly always private commissions, copied from acquaintances and friends or inspired by the maker's own fancy. I think many collections hold such precious specimens, perhaps without any mention of their customary use. I myself own a pair of tiny silver caskets with a fairly snug closure; most likely, I think, they were meant for small trinkets and cufflinks.

I told Nozh about cocaine boxes: [https://knife.media/accessories-20th/](https://knife.media/accessories-20th/?ref=theparnassian.com)