Cocaine In The 1880's

Drug enforcement agencies throughout North America spend over 40 billion tax dollars annually on their government funded war on drugs. The DEA currently classifies cocaine as an addictive and dangerous, schedule-two drug. Around the 1880’s, however, cocaine was celebrated in the United States for its “magical, medicinal purposes” (New Ulm Weekly Review). The miracle medicine of the late 19th century, cocaine, is derived from the coca plant native to South America, more specifically, the Andes Mountains. South Americans chewed the coca leaves for thousands of years to counter the nauseating effects of living in thin mountain-air environments and to stimulate their heart and breathing rates for hunting purposes. In 1859, German Chemist Albert

John Pemberton, chemist and creator of Coca-Cola, used coca leaves as an active ingredient in his new soft drink. Pemberton marketed his “intellectual beverage” that contained “properties of the Coca plant and Cola nuts” as not only “a delicious, exhilarating, refreshing and invigorating beverage,” but he claimed that it was also “a valuable brain tonic, and a cure of all nervous affections- sick headache, Neuralgia, Hysteria, Melancholy…” (Pemberton). The Memphis Appeal published an article in 1887 claiming that “Coca Cola has cured over fifty cases, and never failed in a single instance. This wonderful Nerve Tonic!” (The Memphis Appeal). Besides the success cocaine brought Coca cola, news articles in the late 1880’s were full of promise and enthusiasm when regarding cocaine. One articled claimed that “no modern remedy has been received by the profession (of medicine) with such enthusiasm, none has become so rapidly popular, so scarcely any one has shown so extensive a field of useful application as cocaine” (Iron County Register). Newspapers even began publishing articles that used Freud and Hammond as their sources, claiming that cocaine “is unquestionably of very great value and entirely harmless” (The McCook