Cocaine is a crystalline tropane alkaloid. The name comes from the word coca which is the plant from where the substance comes from and the alkaloid suffix ine. Cocaine is a stimulant and can also act as a suppressant. Cocaine can cause an energetic euphoria in the user. It acts as a serotonin norepinephrine dopamine reuptake inhibitor. To explain; these are the pleasure chemicals that the brain produces as a natural reward for doing life prolonging healthy things. The brain releases these chemicals and when a person is taking cocaine the natural cycle of the chemicals being absorbed by surrounding cells is disrupted causing a swell of these pleasure causing chemicals in the brain.
THE EARLY HISTORY OF COCAINE
The coca plant was originally found in South America primarily in the Andes mountain. Raw leaves of the plant were consumed by the natives of the region. It was rich in vitamins and nutrients and would cause the chewer to have a boost of energy and suppressed hunger. It also helped blood clotting. It was also believed to heal malaria, indigestion, ulcers, as well as improved longevity and sexuality. Because it was primarily grown in the Andes, where nutritional plants are scarce, and contained so many nutrients vital to human survival, it is believed that the consumption of the leaves may have been essential for survival in that region. Also the natives of the region associated the coca plant with a particular goddess that they believed they had to appease for the growing of their crops. When the Spanish took over that region they tried to make the chewing of the coca plant illegal but they found that the natives worked better and were in a better mood when they chewed the coca leaves.
In 1855 German chemist Friedrich Gaedcke isolated the active alkaloid found in the coca plant. He called it Erythroxyline. A few years later in 1859 Albert Niemann perfected the purification process to extract the alkaloid in Gottingen University. He coined the term cocaine which has stuck to this day. It was found to have substantial anesthetic qualities as well as blood clotting functions and was soon in a large amount of tonics and medicines. They claimed to be treatments for everything to depression to tooth pain. It was also recommended to recovering opium addicts alcoholics.
FREUD AND COCAINE
Sigmund Freud, one of the founding fathers of modern day psychiatry, was a heavy user of cocaine. He and one of his friends, Koller, conducted medical experiments on each other while dosed on cocaine. Koller had discovered the uses of cocaine in eye operations. Cocaine was especially good for these operations because the doctor required the patient to be awake and be able to move their eyes in certain positions throughout the operations while not experiencing agonizing pain. Cocaine works as a topical anesthetic and a also as a blood vessel constrictor and helps blood clotting as well.
Freud also ingested cocaine with his good friend Wilhelm Fleiss a young ear, nose and throat doctor. Fleiss and Freud often stayed up all night ingesting cocaine coming up with all kinds strange medical theories. For instance they came up with the idea that all that was ailing a person could be related to various bumps in the person’s nose. They would do various operations on each other using cocaine as an anesthetic during and as pain reliever afterwards. They both started to feel much better but whether or not the feeling of increased health was due to the operations they performed or to the ample amounts of cocaine they consumed before during and after said operations remains questionable.
These strange nose operations did not always end up very well. In one case, concerning a young lady by the name of Emma Eckstein, things did not end very well at all. She suffered from hysteria and Freud felt the best person to treat the problem was his good friend Fleiss. Fleiss discovered a bump inside her nasal cavity and declared that this was the source of all her troubles. He operated on the poor young lady and then proceeded to leave the city. A month later Emma returned to see Dr. Freud complaining of considerable pain in the area where the surgery was performed. Upon examination it was found that a large amount of gauze had been left negligently behind. Freud consulted other surgeons and the gauze was removed. Freud had this to say about the whole affair. ”There was still moderate bleeding in the nose and mouth; the fetid odor was very bad. [The doctor] suddenly pulled at something like a thread, kept on pulling. Before either of us had time to think, at least a half a meter of gauze had been removed from the cavity. The next moment came a flood of blood. The patient turned white, her eyes bulged and she had no pulse…At the moment the foreign body came out and everything became clear to me…I felt sick. After she had been packed, I fled to the next room, drank a bottle of water, and felt miserable…”
By 1904 Freud had quit using cocaine, realizing that cocaine was not the wonder drug that he had hypothesized. There is no way of really knowing what effect, if any, Freud’s cocaine use had on his study and theories of the human psyche. There is the possibility that his use affected his theories regarding sex, as heavy users are usually obsessed with it. Who knows where psychoanalysis would be today if Freud had never come across cocaine.
COCAINE IN THE UNITED STATES
Coca-cola was another thing that brought fame to cocaine. John Styth Pemberton came up with a wine that contained cocaine in Atlanta GA in 1881. It was fairly successful but in the 1885 Atlanta made the sale of alcohol illegal. Pemberton changed the recipe took out the alcohol and called the new drink Coca-Cola. Business was ok but not what Pemberton had expected it to be and he later sole his entire operation to Asa Griggs Candler for a mere $2300.
Love affairs often go sour as it was with the public’s love for cocaine. In the early 1900s public officials were beginning to get concerned with the social problems caused by extensive cocaine use. The Harrision Narcotic Act was passed in 1914. It severely limited the legal uses of cocaine highly curtailing the extensive use of the drug for the early part of the twentieth century.
The invention of amphetamine in the 1930s almost completely eradicated the use of cocaine. However in the 1960s the popularity of the drug began to come back. By 1970 the drug was classified as a controlled substance and having it in ones possession became illegal. This did not deter people from using it however and by the mid-1980s due to a plentiful supply and a decrease in price there was an epidemic and all classes of society were affected. To this day the illegal use of cocaine is still a problem with many people suffering from addiction to it.
Over the last ten years, Narconon of Georgia has seen a steady flow of cocaine abusers needing treatment. The attention on cocaine abuse has been eclipsed by the recent attention on prescription drugs and that epidemic. Never-the-less, it continues to be a drug of abuse and one that often needs drug treatment and a drug that should not be overlooked.
