Cocaine was once something dentists applied and schoolchildren used, but its harsh effects led to new laws and squads of police assigned especially to curtail its sale. Dealers adjusted accordingly, including one Parisian purveyor who made good use of his confederate’s artificial limb. The opening of an article in the July 30, 1922 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Paris–A walking cocaine storehouse in the shape of a man with a hollow wooden leg is the latest to come under the eye of the Paris drug squad. The one-legged man was not the cocaine merchant; he was merely the warehouse. The merchant was another man with two good legs, who carried the money, but none of the drug. He went about Montmartre, followed by the cripple. He sought the clients, and when he found them, the customer, the wooden-legged man and the merchant adjourned to the back room of a cafe or a dark hallway to make the transfer.

The merchant had the only key to the receptacle in the wooden leg. The man who owned the leg, on the other hand, had no access to the drug he carried. The merchant unlocked the wooden leg, measured out the powder he had sold, locked the leg up again and told his walking storehouse to be on his way.

Severe as are the penalties for dealing in cocaine, the high profits, small equipment and ease of concealment with which the trade is carried on have caused a great increase in its volume.”