For at least a millennium, South American people chewed the coca leaf for its nutritional and anesthetic properties. When the Spanish arrived, they at first did not believe the claims that coca leaves had health benefits. They banned it, claiming it was of the devil. However, they soon had a change of heart. They allowed it, taxed the hell out of it, and became big fans of cocaine.
In 1859, cocaine (coca leaves that have been refined) was used to treat all kinds of medical conditions. Pope Leo XIII carried a flask of cocaine-infused wine with him at all times. And, yes, the original Coca-Cola formula contained "a pinch of coca leaves." However, in 1906, with the passage of the Pure Food & Drug Act, they began using "decocainized" leaves. It's unknown exactly how much cocaine was originally used.
Perhaps not unexpectedly, Sigmund Freud LOVED cocaine. He even wrote a treatise, "Uber Cocaine," upon the subject, in which he says: "Exhilaration and lasting euphoria, which in no way differs from the normal euphoria of the healthy person. You perceive an increase of self-control and possess more vitality and capacity for work. In other words, you are simply normal, and it is soon hard to believe you are under the influence of any drug. Long intensive physical work is performed without any fatigue. This result is enjoyed without any of the unpleasant after-effects that follow exhilaration brought about by alcohol. Absolutely no craving for the further use of cocaine appears after the first, or even after repeated taking of the drug." Obviously, he was kind of wrong.
It was used as anesthesia in Europe by the 1880s, and was used to treat morphine addiction beginning in the 1870s. Clearly, not the best idea medicine has ever had.
In the US of A, cocaine could be bought at your friendly neighborhood pharmacy. You could buy it in pill form, rolled into cigarettes, infused into alcohol, or conveniently prepackaged in little hypodermic needles.
By the late Victorian era, some people had begun to remember the old adage, "If it seems too good to be true, it probably is." But it remained legal. Sherlock Holmes, gentleman junkie, never had to meet his dealer in a dark parking lot. The 1907 Abercrombie & Fitch catalog sold a first aid kit complete with a couple of doses of cocaine. Because, clearly, if you're hurt in the woods, injecting a powerful mind-altering stimulant directly into your bloodstream is the way to go. In 1909, Ernest Shackleton took cocaine tablets on his expedition to Antarctica. In the US, bosses (usually white) fed their workers (often black and/or lower class) cocaine like it was candy because it made them work harder and faster and longer. (The race thing is important later on, I'm not being arbitrarily racist.) Even as late as WWII, the Germans were working on "pep pills" made with cocaine to feed to their troops.
But by the turn of the century, most people had figured out that this "wonder drug" was not so wonderful after all. It was highly addictive. It damaged the brain. And white America became morally outraged by the evils of cocaine when they were informed by The American Journal of Pharmacy in 1903 that most cocaine addicts were "bohemians, gamblers, high- and low-class prostitutes, night porters, bell boys, burglars, racketeers, pimps, and casual laborers." As if that weren't specific (and inaccurate) enough, the Pennsylvania State Pharmacy Board released a statement in 1914: "Most of the attacks upon the white women of the South are the direct result of a cocaine-crazed Negro brain." That same year, cocaine was kind of made illegal by the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act. Though it was banned by the law, cocaine is not a narcotic, but a stimulant. Technically, still legal. It continued to be openly used until the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. After that, obviously, people didn't just stop using it once it was illegal, but it wasn't filling candy dishes in the workplace, and I doubt the Pope still carries it on his person at all times.
I know I need to have a snappy conclusion to this article, but I've said everything I possibly can about cocaine. If you've read this far and are disappointed now, that's just your loss. Sorry.
By the way, I didn't mean to abandon the blog the last few days. I was without internet while there were painters at the house.
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