âlol Arthur Conan Doyle clearly didnât know anything about drugs. Sherlock Holmes did cocaine but it calmed him down. Thatâs not how cocaine works!â
There are two options: Arthur Conan Doyle had never met someone addicted to cocaine or he met some with ADHD who was addicted to cocaine
#you cannot convince me sherlock 'i don't see a use for this common knowledge i shall forget it immediately' holmes wasn't adhd as hell #sherlock 'if i have nothing to do for a day i will literally start shooting the walls out of boredom' holmes #sherlock 'i have built a perfect wax replica of myself - why? iunno' holmes
He specifically took drugs when he didn't have a case to occupy himself, that man was ADHD as fuck
ACD was a practicing doctor and ship's surgeon during the period where cocaine was routinely used as medicine and described by medical journals as "the blessed instrument of Christ," so not only is there exactly zero chance that he'd never met anyone addicted to cocaine, he also almost certainly administered cocaine to people.
It's also definitely not a stretch at all to say he'd probably met people who self-medicated with cocaine to deal with what we'd now call ADHD. Like, the second ever Sherlock Holmes story begins with Watson protesting Holmes' overuse of cocaine, and Holmes replying that he needs it to deal with his overactive brain -- it's entirely plausible that ACD had had that exact conversation with someone or multiple someones.
Like, the man had been a ship's surgeon. On a whaling ship. The number one place in Victorian times to find men who either couldn't get or couldn't hold down work elsewhere. He was almost certainly extremely familiar with a pretty broad spectrum of neurodivergence and self-medication thereof, even if medical science didn't yet have the terminology to apply to it.
Not only did ACD probably have this conversation with someone in real life, he clearly knew and understood how dangerous cocaine was.
At a time when cocaine was regularly administered by other doctors, Doyle wrote Watson to have a clear aversion and dislike of the drug and understood that it was bad for you. Itâs written as a clear indication that Sherlock, despite all his brilliance and genius, is still a human being who can make very bad decisions for himself.
Not only that, but Watson does ultimately win and gets Sherlock off of his addition to cocaine in the end. It takes him a while, but Sherlock is weened off the drug and this is seen as a good thing for everyone involved. In fact in a later story Watson comes home and sees a needle and fears that Sherlock mightâve had a relapse (he didnât, the needle was just being used for something else involving a case).
Doyle knew what he was doing. He wasnât writing it as an endorsement or as an indication that Sherlock knew better than Watson. Itâs made very clear in the books that Sherlock is highly limited in a lot of ways that Watson is not. Watson was a skilled physician and both he and ACD knew cocaine was not good for someone like Holmes.
Conan Doyle was hyperfixated on history and very mad his excited infodumping historical fiction didn't get the attention the Holmes stories did. He wrote bestselling serialized novels and short stories (that all tend to follow a specific structure) while full time practicing medicine, and by all accounts had a Holmes-like way of Noticing Fucking Everything.
He had a clear disdain for social convention while understanding deeply how to conform to it in order to survive; a lot of Holmes' deductions actually depend on assumptions about typical human behavior in a given situation rather than physical evidence alone. It's the kind of encyclopedic conscious knowledge of unwritten social rules you might develop in order to mask successfully.
He was almost certainly neurodivergent himself. There's a reason classic Holmes fans tend to be Like That. Game recognize game.
