Running Header: COCAINE

Cocaine

Cocaine

Introduction

Cocaine, a substance of notoriety today, is certainly no new drug or menace on the global scene. From 1860, when first synthesized in a German lab from dried Peruvian coca leaf, to around the turn of the century (Goodman, 1993), openly legal and legitimate cocaine stirred a massive boom among scientists and medical men, consumers and enthusiasts of many ilks (Aldrich, and Barker, 1976), and international traders and manufacturers, including some of the world's leading pharmaceutical firms. Yet almost as rapidly, from 1900 to the 1920s, this early medical and commercial fascination with cocaine collapsed, its prestige replaced step by step until the 1960s by the global prohibitionist regimes and underground cocaine circuits that we know too well today. Indeed, it can be argued that cocaine's first rise and fall in the West as a "heroic" and "modern" drug was a prelude to its construction and current status as a dangerous and pariah one. Yet that birth of cocaine, as we know it, remains its hidden history.

This study brings together fresh efforts to retrieve and rethink these elusive origins of the modern drug, cocaine. It looks from global and interdisciplinary perspectives, by comparing and connecting the key facts and forms of cocaine.

Origin of Cocaine

The first wave of intellectual and research fascination with cocaine hit shore with the drug itself, and, to an extent, those nineteenth-century networks of researchers, promoters, enthusiasts, and critics remain an object of study here. After a two-decade lag, the dramatic mid-1880s discovery of cocaine's anesthetic properties brought a flood of writings around cocaine's medicinal uses (as a nascent panacea, it had so many), botany, applications, or history (as in colourful renderings of coca's origins in Andean civilizations)-found in the era's pharmacy, medical, or drug trade journals. Each country seen here had its share of cocaine and coca experts, and dilettantes as well, who left a vast documentary record, some of them virtual classics or primary documents of the field. The German-speaking world had its Karl Köller, E. Merck, Sigmund Freud (as is well known) (Byck, 1974), and more critically Louis Lewin, to name a few; the French, Angelo Mariani (promoter of coca-laced Vin Mariani tonic); the British, such distinguished physicians as Dr Robert Christison, pharmacist William Martindale and a world-renowned botanist in Kew Gardens' Richard Spruce.

In Peru, one finds the surprising and innovative scientific experiments of doctors Tomás Moreno y Maíz and Alfredo Bignon, unsung agronomists like Manuel Vinelli and the industrial projects of Pedro Paulet and Mario Durand, among others. The Dutch saw colonial horticultural campaigns of Emma Reens and A.W.K.de Jong, and the Japanese their cosmopolitan chemist, Jokichi Takamine. Perhaps the North Americans spawned the richest collection of coca and cocaine literature: from pioneer ethno-botanists such as H.H. Rusby to leading surgeons like William S. Halstead and William Hammond, to pharmaceutical innovators like Parke-Davis's Edward Squibb, and coca devotees such as Dr W. Golden Mortimer with his classic herbalist defence History of Coca: "The Divine Plant" of the Incas ...