Sears and Roebuck figures in The Bob Zadek Show only as a passing illustration of the unregulated American drug market of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In two episodes, host Bob Zadek invokes the company’s mail-order catalog to make the same point: cocaine was once a legal, mainstream consumer good, sold openly to ordinary Americans, before drug prohibition was enacted. The excerpts contain no discussion of the company’s history, its founders, its merchandise generally, or its later development; the catalog appears solely as evidence in an argument about the origins of drug law.
The catalog and cocaine
In the April 12, 2009 episode on marijuana legalization, Bob Zadek raised the catalog while describing the racial history of drug regulation. He stated that in the 1800s cocaine was totally unregulated, and that a buyer of a Sears and Roebuck catalog could order a syringe and a small amount of cocaine for $1.50. He returned to the point later in the same episode, saying that cocaine was sold by Sears and Roebuck up until the early twentieth century, and that the catalog offered the syringe and cocaine for $1.50. The claim appears in both instances as an aside — Zadek twice asks his guest, “remember them?” — rather than as a documented historical exhibit; no source for the catalog offer is given in the excerpts. Legalizing Pot in California (2009)
Zadek used the catalog detail to establish that Americans did not consider cocaine or related substances to be inherently bad. In his telling, the drug was available through the most mainstream of American institutions, a mass-market mail-order house, and its sale attracted no particular controversy. The catalog thus functions in his argument as a baseline of legal, ordinary commerce against which the later criminalization of drugs can be measured. Legalizing Pot in California (2009)
The same example, seven years later
The July 16, 2016 episode with Dr. Rick Doblin repeats the catalog example almost verbatim. Introducing a block of history on the racist roots of early drug laws, Zadek said that for most of the country’s history drugs were legal, that cocaine was totally unregulated, and that the Sears and Roebuck catalog offered for sale a syringe and a small amount of cocaine for $1.50. He called it an interesting bit of Americana that he had dug up, and again stressed that the catalog was mainstream America. Dr. Rick Doblin on MAPS and the War on Drugs (2016)
The 2016 telling places the catalog in a slightly fuller narrative than the 2009 version. Zadek pairs it with the claim that Americans did not consider cocaine and related substances to be anything bad, and then moves to the early twentieth century, when he says mainstream institutions found a relationship between what was then offensively called Negro behavior and drug use. The catalog marks the “before” in a before-and-after structure: legal, unremarkable commerce giving way to racially motivated prohibition. Dr. Rick Doblin on MAPS and the War on Drugs (2016)
Across episodes
Both episodes use the Sears and Roebuck catalog in the same way and for the same argument, and the excerpts show no development in the treatment: in 2009 Zadek offers it while questioning lobbyist John Lovell about marijuana legalization, and in 2016 he offers it while setting up a history segment with Dr. Rick Doblin, with the same price, the same syringe, and the same framing of the catalog as mainstream Americana. The only difference the excerpts show is context — the earlier episode embeds the reference in a live policy debate over a California ballot measure, the later one in a retrospective account of prohibition’s origins — not any change in the claim itself. Legalizing Pot in California (2009) Dr. Rick Doblin on MAPS and the War on Drugs (2016)
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state when Sears and Roebuck was founded, where it was based, who ran it, or what became of it, and they give no source for the catalog’s cocaine offer beyond Zadek’s own recollection. They do not describe the catalog’s other contents, its circulation, or its role in American retail. Beyond the $1.50 syringe-and-cocaine item, no Sears and Roebuck product, price, or business practice is named. The company appears in these episodes only as a rhetorical marker of how far drug regulation has traveled from the era when cocaine was sold by mail.