The History of Cocaine - Essay Example

The History of Cocaine Cocaine is a crystalline tropane alkaloid that is obtained from the leaves of the coca plant. It is a stimulant of the centralnervous system and an appetite suppressant, creating what has been described as a euphoric sense of happiness and increased energy. For thousands of years and still today, South American indigenous peoples have chewed the coca leaf (Erythroxylon coca), a plant which contains vital nutrients as well as numerous alkaloids, including cocaine. The leaf was and is chewed almost universally by some indigenous communities, but there is no evidence that its habitual use ever led to any of the negative consequences generally associated with habitual cocaine use today. It is an important source of nutrition and energy in a region that is lacking in other food sources and oxygen; the vitamins and protein present in the leaves, as well as the cocaine alkaloid, helps provide the energy and strength necessary for steep walks in this mountainous area and days without eating (Winger 45-47). Although the stimulant and hunger-suppressant properties of coca had been known for many centuries, the isolation of the cocaine alkaloid was not achieved until 1855. Although many scientists had attempted to isolate cocaine, no one had been successful for two reasons: the knowledge of chemistry required was insufficient at the time, and coca does not grow in Europe and is easily ruined during travel. The cocaine alkaloid was first isolated by the German chemist Friedrich Gaedcke. Gaedcke named the alkaloid "erythroxyline", and published a description in the journal Archives de Pharmacie. In 1856 Friederich Wohler asked Dr. Carl Scherzer, a scientist aboard the Novara (an Austrian frigate sent by Emperor Franz Joseph to circle the globe), to bring him a large amount of coca leaves from South America. In 1859 the ship finished its travels and Wohler received a trunk full of coca. Wohler passed on the leaves to Albert Niemann, a Ph.D. student at the University of Gottingen in Germany, who then developed an improved purification process. Niemann described every step he took to isolate cocaine in his dissertation entitled On a New Organic Base in the Coca Leaves, which was published in 1860 - it also earned him his Ph.D. and is now in the British Library. He wrote of the alkaloid's "colorless transparent prisms" and said that, "Its solutions have an alkaline reaction, a bitter taste, promote the flow of saliva and leave a peculiar numbness, followed by a sense of cold when applied to the tongue." Niemann named the alkaloid "cocaine" - as with other alkaloids its name carried the "-ine" suffix (from Latin -ina). In 1879 cocaine began to be used to treat morphine addiction. Cocaine was introduced into clinical use as a local anaesthetic in Germany in 1884, about the same time as Sigmund Freud published his work Uber Coca, in which he wrote that cocaine causes: ...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... In 1885 the U.S. manufacturer Parke-Davis sold cocaine in various forms, including cigarettes, powder, and even a cocaine mixture that could be injected directly into the user's veins with the included needle. The company promised that its cocaine products would "supply the place of food, make the coward brave, the silent eloquent and ... render the sufferer insensitive to pain." By late Victorian era cocaine use had appeared as a vice in literature, for example as the cocaine injected by Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional Sherlock Holmes. From the 1850's to the early 1900's, cocaine and opium laced elixirs, tonics and wines were broadly used by people of all social classes. This is a fact that is for the most part hidden in American history. The truth is that at this time there was a large drug culture affecting a broad sector of American society. Other famous people that promoted the "miraculous" effects of cocaine elixirs were Thomas Edison and actress Sarah Bernhart. Because there were no restrictions placed on acquiring these drugs in the early 1900's, narcotics were an acceptable way of life for a large number of people, many of whom were people of stature. Cocaine was a main stay in the silent film industry. The pro-drug messages coming out of Hollywood at this time were receiving international attention which influenced the attitudes of millions of people about cocaine (Eddy et al. 721-722). As a rule, famous people are role models that can and do influence the masses. Star power has proven time and again to be the most potent form of advertising. Think about it: The worlds most famous psychologist; the man that invented the light bulb; a stable of Hollywood silent film stars; and the inventor or the most popular soft drink in history - all on the pro-cocaine band wagon. All promoting the drug's positive effects. Some did it through personal testimonials that ran in printed pages across the nation. Others (in particular the silent film stars) promoted cocaine's acceptability through the examples they set by their well publicized life styles. In the same way as other narcotics like opium and heroin during this time, cocaine also began to be used as an active ingredient in a variety of "cure all" tonics and beverages. In many of the tonics that drug companies were producing at this time, cocaine would be mixed with opiates and administered freely to old and young alike. It wasn't until some years later that the dangers of these drugs became apparent. In fact, it was the negative side effects of habitual cocaine use that was responsible for coining the phrase, "dope fiend". This terminology came about because of the behavior of a person abusing cocaine for prolonged periods of time. Because cocaine is such a powerful stimulant, prolonged daily use of the drug creates severe sleep deprivation and loss of appetite. A person might go days or sometimes weeks without sleeping or eating properly. The user often experiences psychotic behavior. They hallucinate and become delusionary. Coming down from the drug causes a severe state of depression for the person in withdrawal. This person can then become so desperate for more of the drug that they will do just about anything to get more of it, including murder. If the drug is not readily available, the depression one experiences in withdrawal can become so great the user will sometimes become suicidal. It is because of this heinous effect on the user that the word "fiend" became associated with cocaine addiction. In 1914, cocaine was banned in the US. Except for a few uses in medicine as a local anesthetic, cocaine has been illegal worldwide ever since. Since 1914, the possession, sale, and giving away of cocaine have been highly regulated and subject to severe legal penalties. During the 1940s, 1950s, and most of the 1960s, the smuggling of cocaine into the United States was very limited and the black market in cocaine was relatively small. Other drugs, such as amphetamines, which were available far more cheaply than cocaine, grew in popularity as drugs of abuse. Late in the 1960s, law-enforcement agencies began cracking down heavily on the amphetamine black market, and cocaine use regained popularity. As it had been early in the century, in the 1960s and 70s, cocaine was mostly sniffed. Cocaine hydrochloride is a fine white powder with a bitter, numbing taste. Some cocaine abusers, no longer able to get the high they were seeking from sniffing the drug, have mixed it with water and injected it intravenously. However, most people are unwilling or unable to inject themselves. Soon, a smokeable form of cocaine was developed. Freebasing cocaine involves mixing it with highly explosive solvents, such as ether, and heating it. This technique is physically dangerous because the solvent tends to ignite. Crack cocaine is the most popularly used version of cocaine today. Smoking cocaine rocks began in the late 1970's. Rocking-up cocaine powder and smoking it was originally the method developed so distributors of cocaine could test the purity of the drug before it was purchased from the manufacturers. Crack has destroyed millions of lives since it was first introduced to the streets of America. Crack is a relatively new drug on the scene compared to drugs like opium or heroin; nonetheless, it has been part of our history and culture for nearly 150 years. In the early 1980s, a more convenient and less dangerous method of producing smokeable cocaine became common. The process involved concentrating ordinary cocaine hydrochloride by heating the drug in a solution of baking soda. This process rarely ended in fires or explosions. In addition, it allowed dealers to "stretch" the raw material; a tiny bit of cocaine hydrochloride made a full dose of the new freebase. Freebase cocaine vaporizes at a low temperature, so it can be easily inhaled from a heated pipe. This type of freebase cocaine makes a crackling sound when heated, so it was named "crack." The wholesale price of a kilogram of cocaine dropped from about $55,000 in 1981 to about $25,000 in 1984. In addition, turning cocaine hydrochloride into crack meant that one "dose" went from about twenty dollars to about five dollars. When each dose became so much cheaper, dealers could sell to rich and poor alike and make more money. A cocaine addiction epidemic was underway (Jaffe 284-324). . Back in the 80's many experts naively believed cocaine was not dangerous and that addiction was defined by the presence of an observable abstinence syndrome. Users' and addicts' experiences changed these ideas and changed the way psychiatrists diagnosed addiction. Researchers and clinicians had believed that cocaine was simply a reuptake inhibitor, and the drug was even being tried as an antidepressant based on that. They thought cocaine increased catecholamines, especially dopamine, and they didn't differentiate acute from chronic use. In many scientists' view, the nation has gone through four major waves of drug use, beginning with LSD in the early 1960s, marijuana in the mid-to-late-'60s, heroin from 1969 to 1971 and cocaine in the late '70s and '80s. Norman Zinberg, a psychiatrist at Harvard who, since 1963, had been studying national drug-abuse patterns, believed shifting patterns in drug abuse are signs of the times, reflections of the country's shifting zeitgeist. "Cocaine became the drug of the '80s because it's a stimulant," he said. "People were looking for action. It fit the mood, just like psychedelics fit the mood of the early '60s." (Zinberg 38). In 1976 the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) took the first step toward monitoring regional trends when it formed the Community Epidemiology Work Group, an assembly of drug-abuse experts from 20 cities around the country who meet biannually to exchange data. "Drug-abuse problems sometimes develop very quickly at the local level," says Nicholas J. Kozel, chief of NIDA's statistical and epidemiologic analysis branch and chairman of the group. "Up until about a year and a half ago, there wasn't much of a crack problem in Washington, DC," Kozel explains. "Then all of a sudden we had more violence and murder than we'd ever seen, most of it associated with drugs, especially crack. Drug abuse is different from Boston to Buffalo to Washington. It pops up this month and recedes the next. That's why we need local surveillance. It keeps you on the edge of your seat, trying to stay alert to these changes and their impact on the health of our nation." (Karch 67) Compounding these regional variations is the movement of particular drugs through social classes. In a fairly predictable pattern, drug epidemics seem to begin among a small, elite group, then filter down into the broad middle class and finally permeate the ghetto. In 1983, half of the callers to 1-800-COCAINE, the national cocaine-abuse hot line, were college-educated, 52% had family incomes of at least $25,000 and only 16% were unemployed. By 1987, only 16% of the callers were college-educated, a mere 20% had incomes of $25,000 and fully 54% were among the unemployed. Demand for illegal drugs has been dropping in the middle class for 10 years, according to two national surveys sponsored by NIDA. The most recent National Household Survey on Drug Abuse showed that drug use among 18- to 25-year-olds leveled off between 1979 and 1985. The first substantial decline in cocaine consumption among American high-school seniors, college students and young adults showed up in a 1987 survey conducted by the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research. The most recent available poll shows that the decline continued throughout the early 1990s (Nahas 102-106). Arguably the strongest regulator of drug use is the public's perception of a drug's safety. America's first epidemic of cocaine abuse a century ago began when doctors had only good things to say about it. Cocaine's perceived risks have followed much the same trajectory in its second epidemic. In 1985 psychiatrist Lester Grinspoon and lawyer James B. Bakalar wrote in a chapter of The Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry that "High price still restricts consumption for all but the very rich, and those involved in trafficking. . . . If used moderately and occasionally, cocaine creates no serious problems." In that same year, the University of Michigan's annual survey of high-school students and young adults found that only 34% believed that trying cocaine once or twice was a "great risk." By 1987, amidst thundering anti-drug news in the national media, that proportion had jumped to 47.9%, and by 1988 more than half of those polled thought that even experimenting with cocaine was very risky. "The perceived risks have shifted enough that they could fully account for the shifts in use," says Jerald G. Bachman, one of the survey researchers (Johanson 80). Drugs for the '90s: Even now, as the uproar of negative publicity about crack's debilitating effects has checked its spread among middle-class users, another stimulant -- a smokable, fastacting form of methamphetamine -- has entered the drug scene in the West and, according to some experts, has begun moving eastward. Police officers in various areas have been seizing unprecedented numbers of clandestine methamphetamine laboratories, and there has been a sharp rise in both hospital emergency-room reports and deaths related to use of the stimulant (Diala et al. 20). A case study in the progression of a new drug trend can be seen in the recent emergence of MDMA, better known as Ecstasy. First produced in 1914 but forgotten for years, the drug attracted the attention of psychotherapists in the '70s because, besides its stimulant and mildly psychedelic qualities, it could also increase patients' insight and empathy. By 1985, however, Ecstasy had become a recreational drug associated with a distinct type of music and dancing called "acid house" that originated on the Spanish island of Ibiza where wealthy people vacation. It served as a sort of new, improved brand of cocaine: It was exclusive, it provided the energy for dancing until dawn, it was allegedly "harmless," and -- perhaps most attractive -- it made people not only want to talk -- as most stimulants do -- but also to listen. Researchers quickly found, however, that Ecstasy can damage brain cells in animals, even in low doses that correspond to the dosages people use for recreation, and the DEA outlawed it for most purposes in 1985. Recently made illegal in most of Europe, it drew the kind of sensational headlines there last summer that crack had garnered in America. Yet that publicity failed to cross the Atlantic, and Ecstasy continues to enjoy a safe and exclusive image here (National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse 25). Despite the advances in trend analysis for drug abuse, nobody seems prepared to forecast the future. Some-including, most notably, psychiatrist Jerome Jaffe, the country's first "drug czar" under President Richard Nixon and the current head of federal addiction research efforts--are skeptical about our ability to make accurate predictions at all. Although he concedes that, without question, drug abuse follows a "trendy, fashionable popularity cycle," he doesn't believe we know enough about those cycles to predict what will happen next (Jaffe 122). Historian Musto thinks that the most important trend is the decreased use of illegal drugs by the middle class that has cut through all of the various cycles since 1979. History is indeed a guide to Musto, who investigated long-forgotten documents on America's first drug epidemic at the turn of the century for The American Disease. To him, the year-to-year shifts in drug use are all-but-imperceptible "blips" in our declining interest in illicit drugs. According to Musto, "Crack seemed to be the ultimate drug problem, one so frightening that it crystallized our intolerance toward all drugs. It has created a consensus in society against drugs and ended the ambivalence that had been prevalent for decades." Musto fears that America's turn against drugs could have serious social repercussions. "My concern is that as demand goes down in the middle class, instead of channeling efforts into long-term plans to help, people will get angrier and angrier at those in the inner city who still use drugs," he explains. "If we triple the amount of money we spend to battle the drug problem and if we pass a death-penalty measure expecting to solve the problem in a year, we'll only become frustrated by the results. The decline in drug use will be a long, gradual process. We're going down a road, and we've still got a long way to go." (Jaffe 140) A drug epidemic takes on a different character when it reaches the ghetto: There are more deaths--including the killing of innocent standers-by--and other tragedies such as addiction in newborns. Failure to recognize these people as victims, Musto says, and consequent failure to pursue aggresive public education and jobs programs, will only exacerbate an already difficult social problem. Use of the powder form of cocaine has stayed relatively constant, experiencing a new height of use during the late 1990s and early 2000s in the USA. Cocaine use is prevalent across all socioeconomic strata, including age, demographics, economic, social, political, religious, and livelihood. Cocaine in its various forms comes in second only to cannabis as the most popular illegal recreational drug in the United States, and is number one in street value sold each year (Bourgois 13). The estimated U.S. cocaine market exceeded $35 billion in street value for the year 2003, exceeding revenues by corporations such as AT&T and Starbucks. There is a tremendous demand for cocaine in the U.S. market, particularly among those who are making incomes affording luxury spending, such as single adults and various professionals. Cocaine's status as a club drug shows its immense popularity among the "party crowd". Cocaine's high revenues may be due to the drug's psychologically addictive nature, which makes the cessation of use quite difficult when compared to less addictive drugs such as marijuana. It has become much more popular as a middle class drug in the United Kingdom in recent years. Works Cited: Bourgois, Phillipe. In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Diala, C. Muntaner, C. Walrath, C. "Gender, occupational, and socioeconomic correlates of alcohol and drug abuse among U.S. rural, metropolitan, and urban residents". American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, May 2004. Eddy, N.B., Halbach, H., Isbell, H., Seevers, M.H. Drug dependence: its significance and characteristics. Bulletin of the World Health Org., 23, 1975. Jaffe, J.H. Drug addiction and drug abuse. New York: MacMillan, 1995. Johanson, Chris-Ellyn. The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Drugs: Cocaine, A New Epidemic. New York, 1989. Karch, Steven. A Brief History of Cocaine. Oxford University Press, 1996. Nahas, Gabriel. The Experimental Use of Cocaine in Human Subjects. Bulletin on Narcotics, 1990. National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse. Report: Drug Use In America: Problem in Perspective. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1999. Winger, Gail. A Handbook on Cocaine Abuse: The Biomedical Aspects. Oxford University Press, 1992. Zinberg, Norman. Drug, Set and Setting: The Basis for Controlled Intoxicant Use. Oxford University Press, 1990. Read More