Cocaine has a very long, interesting and obscure history that begins with the coca shrub, which has been used around the Andes mountains for at least 3000 years
[1].
Coca was very important to religious occasions in the Incan civilization and it's use was reserved to the ruling classes., up until the Spanish conquest.
After the fall of the Incan empire, coca chewing became commonplace and was even used as a medium of exchange.But soon Spanish missionaries began to argue that coca interfered with the conversion of these natives to Catholicism and the practice became discouraged and banned in many areas.But the Spanish soon realized that, without this powerful stimulant, the natives were much less productive, and couldn't work as long in the mines and coca chewing was once again allowed by the Spanish rulers and the church.
Cocaine, in the form of coca chewing, never gained popularity in Europe in part because of it's degradation on the long voyage, although this was about to change;
In 1863, Angelo Mariani, a french chemist who became interested in coca after reading a paper on the subject by Paolo Mantegazza, and went on to create the first widely sold coca extract: Vin Mariani.It used alcohol as a solvent (in the form of wine) to make a cocaine solution from the coca leaves which contained aproximately 6-7mg of cocaine per bottle.
Vin Mariani was extremely popular, and soon, poeple like Queen Victoria of Great Britain and Ireland, Pope Leo XIII and Thomas Edison were endorsing it to the public, with numerous copycat cocaine beverages coming to the market soon after, the most notable of them being Coca-Cola.
In 1859, Albert Niemann isolated cocaine, and soon numerous doctors began to promote the use of the drug for all kinds of ailments, including depression, pain, indigestion, and child birth with it's use as a local anesthetic being discovered later on
[2] [3] .The most notable of these physicians was Dr Sigmound Freud, who in the spring of 1884 wrote his “Über Coca”, known as the best medical and experimental analysis of the drug at the time
[4]. It was also frequently supplied to slaves and railroad workers as a way to increase their productivity
[5].
Pharmaceutical companies such as Merck rushed to produce cocaine on an industrial scale, and this marked the beginning of cocaine's bittersweet relationship with man and society, that hasn't been over to this day, nor will it likely ever end.
By the beginning of the 20th century, the problems of addiction, violence and rising crime were apparent, and this, combined with the widespread belief that cocaine incited African-Americans to commit rape and murder, led in part to the 1914 Harisson tax act, which required cocaine and
opioids to be dispensed only with a doctor's order
[6]
Ever since, cocaine suffered increasing amounts of control, and is today a schedule II substance, almost exclusively used as a local anesthetic in dentistry
[7].
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