Woe to you, my princess, when I come. I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are forward you shall see who is the stronger, a little girl who doesn't eat enough or a big strong man with cocaine in his body. In my last serious depression I took cocaine again and a small dose lifted me to the heights in a wonderful fashion. I am just now collecting the literature for a song of praise to this magical substance.
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The first medical article Freud published was "Über Coca" in 1885, which lauded the use of cocaine in depression and morphine addiction, while also commenting on its anaesthetic qualities. Pleased with his progress, Freud took time off to visit Martha. When he returned in September, cocaine was causing astir, but not because of his paper. Karl Koller, a colleague Freud had conducted experiments with, had made a breakthrough with cocaine and become an instant celebrity. He'd developed it as a local anaesthetic for eye surgery. Although Freud had touched on cocaine's anesthetic properties, Koller had identified its tissue-numbing capabilities. As it would have enabled him to marry Martha, Freud envied Koller's success. In later life, he claimed that it was Martha's fault that he was not already famous at an early age.
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While Koller was at his house, Freud received a visit from his father, who had an eye complaint. After diagnosing glaucoma, they operated on him the next day, using cocaine as an anaesthetic. His father's eyesight was saved. The medical community scrambled to use it as an anaesthetic in a variety of procedures ranging from tooth extraction to haemorrhoid surgery. It was soon heralded as a cure for hay fever, asthma, opium and morphine addiction and for every complaint imaginable ranging from ingrowing toenails to nymphomania. It was sold in lozenges, cigarettes, cough medicines and cold cures. Bars offered shots of whiskey with cocaine. In America, its price jumped from $2.50 to $13 a gram. The lead producer, Merck, ramped-up production from fifty grams in 1879 to thirty kilos in 1885.
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Even though medical professionals had certified cocaine as being completely safe, by 1885, its side-effects were becoming apparent, especially among those who'd used it first: physicians, chemists, pharmacists, doctors, dentists and their wives, some of whom ended up in the madhouse.
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To a friend, Freud had recommended cocaine for morphine addiction. The friend ended up hooked on cocaine and morphine. Freud spent "the most frightful night" of his life babysitting his friend, who, suffering from cocaine psychosis, kept picking at imaginary insects and snakes crawling beneath his skin.
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It was determined that cocaine did not cure morphine addiction. It just substituted one addiction for another and sometimes left people addicted to both. One doctor predicted it would be the third great scourge of the human race after alcohol and opium. A Russian doctor gave twenty-three grains of cocaine to a girl he was about to operate on. She died and he committed suicide. Perhaps the last straw for Freud occurred when he fatally overdosed a patient on it.
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Dr Albrecht Hirschmüller of the University of Tübingen traced Freud's error back to work Freud had originally read concerning cocaine's use for morphine addiction in a journal called the Therapeutic Gazette, which Freud had discovered in the index catalogue of the Surgeon General's Office. Seven papers he had quoted in "Über Coca" were from the Therapeutic Gazette, which, unknown to Freud, was owned by the Parke, Davis pharmaceutical company of Detroit, the American manufacturer of cocaine. It was an early instance of Big Pharma co-opting a doctor: Freud had accepted $24 from Park, Davis to vouch for their cocaine, which he had claimed was as good as Merck's.
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Flak rained down on Freud for his claims in "Über Coca." Even though he'd finally man-aged tO marry Martha in 1886, Freud described 1887 as "the least successful and darkest year" of his life. He never published any more papers on cocaine. He buried the theories and went on to found psychoanalysis. With the zeal of enemy combatants, researchers still argue over whether cocaine gave Freud the inspiration and vivid dreams that contributed to the development of his
later theories.
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Although most of its supposed medical benefits were debunked, cocaine use in America climbed as people became addicted to patent medicines. But that was all about to stop, at least for black people.
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At the turn of the nineteenth century, agricultural depression and labour struggles increased tension among the whites, some of whom channelled their discontent into the despicable act of lynching black people. Gangs of vigilantes grabbed innocent blacks and hung them from the nearest tree. When the blacks dared to fight back, the whites got it into their heads that the number one cause of such retaliation was cocaine.
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For decades, the whites had felt threatened by the customs of the blacks. After the Civil War, the blacks in southern states were banned from drinking alcohol on the grounds that when intoxicated they became dangerous to whites. The majority of politicians believed that the whites were able to behave them-selves while intoxicated, whereas black people lacked such restraint.
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In 1901, Henry Cabot Lodge spearheaded a law that banned the sale of liquor and opiates to "'uncivilized races," including blacks, aborigines, Eskimos, Hawaiians and immigrant railroad workers. Cocaine dodged inclusion until a decade later when headlines courtesy of William Randolph Hearst reported on the new southern menace: cocaine. The same reasoning that had outlawed alcohol and opium to black people now spread to cocaine.
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Thus was born the myth of the cocaine-crazed Negro with superhuman strength who you could shoot, but wouldn't die. One news-paper stated, "In attempting to arrest a hitherto peaceful negro who had become crazed by cocaine, a police officer in self-defence drew his revolver, placed the muzzle over the negro's heart, and fired. And yet, this bullet did not even stagger the crazed negro, and neither did a second."
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The police were so spooked that they demanded higher-calibre bullets to shoot blacks under the influence of cocaine because anything less would be repelled by their superhuman strength. Calibres
.25 and .32 were replaced by 38, which decades later were replaced by Glocks when the ReaganBush administration propagandised black
crack use to terrify the nation into tightening drug laws, and to spend hundreds of millions of taxpayers' dollars to hunt down Pablo Escobar.
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