Who would have thought that the devil’s dandruff was once considered a remarkable medicine?
Even though today it is widely known that cocaine use represents serious health hazards, long before it became the gangsters’ and flamboyant disco-dancers’ beloved snow white, its use became widespread because it was actually believed to bring a myriad benefits to one’s health. It all happened during the frenzy of the late nineteenth century, a time in which corsets were considered beautiful and tuberculosis was deemed fashionable.
One of the first people to speak of its benefits was the legendary founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, who did some of his earliest research on the stimulant, looking for recognition as a physician in Vienna when he was young. As he states in a letter to his wife-to-be Martha, he himself had experienced the profound benefits of the substance. He took small doses of the white powder in order to treat his own depression and stomach pain, always with great results. He had the intention of writing a paper that could express all of the traits that he saw in the substance, hoping that it would win a place alongside morphine as a therapeutical substance. The paper, royally named Über Coca, eventually came out after he devoured all of the case studies in which other physicians had recorded the effects of cocaine hydrochloride —the concentrated powder from the South American coca leaf, which was nearly a hundred times more powerful than it—, and he concluded that it could be used as both a painkiller and as a remedy to morphine addiction.
Following the success of Freud’s research, there was an upsurge of companies that focused on selling alcoholic drinks rich in cocaethlyene, such as the Italian Vin Mariani, a wine loved by many writers of the time that contained almost 200 milligrams per bottle. Through a wide campaign of positive publicity, they claimed that the drug could could have quite a number of miracle effects over our body. The advertised that cocaine could alleviate quite a number of maladies, among them asthma, anxiety, tuberculosis, indigestion, toothaches, and that it even be used for cosmetic purposes. Even the Pope Leon XIII posed for an advertisement of the substance. Wouldn’t have you gotten one to keep at home just in case?
In the US, a Civil War veteran named John Syth Pemberton in Atlanta invented a non-alcoholic drink rich in sugar and cocaine that we all know: Coca-Cola itself. Its advertisement focused on how “invigorating” cocaine was, and this should come as no surprise: each bottle contained the equivalent of a thin line of coke. However, just a few years after its release, the medical community started to realize that the downsides of the substance were actually much more intense than its potential health benefits by the last decade of the eighteen hundreds, and everyone’s favorite beverage had to get rid from its secret ingredient by the turn of the century. Even Freud himself, who had started his career in medical research thanks to the substance, swore against it after suffering from coke dependency, nasal blockages, and even cardiovascular irregularities. Nonetheless, even though he quit the substance, he never acknowledged publicly how the drug had negatively affected his life.
Although by the beginning of the twentieth century cocaine had already stopped being advertised as a miracle drug, it was not outlawed in the US until 1914 with the arrival of the Harrison Narcotics Act, which banned the use of the substance for non medical purposes. Throughout the rest of the century, the drug was in low demand until the seventies, when it became a sign of opulence and trendiness according to Mark Kleiman, who authored the book Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know. Afterwards, the drug has had its ups and downs in the mainstream market depending on the trends. But the truth is that it still is widely popular amongst partygoers, who use the drug for recreational purposes. It’s market value today, in spite of it’s illegal status, is around 400 billion dollars estimated worth.
Nowadays, nearly one fourth of the heart attacks among people between 18-45 years of age is related to the use of cocaine. Regular users are seven times more likely to suffer from heart attacks than people who don’t use it. For years, it’s been one of the pillars of blood-shedding drug cartels. From being a miracle drug, cocaine has become one of the deadliest substances in the world.
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Sources:
CNN
The Independent
