Cocaine

Cocaine, a central nervous system stimulant, offers a contrast to the opiates, although both have been subject to extreme praise and condemnation. Coca bushes are native to South America, and the leaves have been chewed there for millennia.

Pure cocaine proved extraordinarily popular. Within a year of its introduction in the United States in 1884, Parke, Davis & Co. offered cocaine and coca in 14 forms. Cocaine was expensive, but soon became an ingredient in the new drink Coca­Cola and was found to be a specific remedy for hay fever and sinusitis. Within a few years, reports ap­peared in medical journals and the popular press telling of ruined careers and bizarre behavior among some users, but eminent experts such as William A. Hammond, a professor of neurology in New York medical schools and a former surgeon-general of the U.S. army, reassured the profession and the public that cocaine was harmless and the habit no more severe than that of drinking coffee.

Within 10 years, however, observers raised serious doubts that cocaine was as safe as had been asserted by Hammond and by cocaine’s chief advocate in Eu­rope, Sigmund Freud. By the first decade of the twen­tieth century, cocaine was no longer considered an ideal tonic but an extremely dangerous substance. In the United States, this new image, now associated with uncontrolled consumption, violence, and dis­torted thinking, provided powerful impetus to estab­lish a national antinarcotic law, despite constitu­tional restrictions. In most other nations cocaine production and distribution was already regulated by national pharmacy laws. Through a complex se­ries of events, the United States placed a national prohibition on narcotics use except for medical pur­poses and initiated an international campaign to con­trol the production and distribution of opiates and cocaine.