• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1124 0

The cocaine-laden soda was a happiness tonic and seemed to have nothing to do with what killed Charley and so many like him. After a while, though, the connection was hard to ignore. The company began removing the cocaine from Coca-Cola in 1902. Still, it packed a good measure of caffeine, and this, too, was seen as a happiness drug. Slogans for the drink from 1905 include: “Coca-Cola revives and sustains” and “The favorite drink for ladies when thirsty, weary, and despondent.” The famous slogan “Coca-Cola lightens worries” showed up in 1907. Again, today, in the West, we refer to caffeine as a wakefulness drug, but many other cultures, even our own a hundred years ago, spoke of it as a happiness drug. Wakeful is productive. Bliss wastes time. The other important work caffeine does is to symbolically erase class. Coca-Cola ads proclaimed, “All classes, ages and sexes drink Coca-Cola.” Caffeine’s most popular brand name specifically advertised to cross lines of class and gender—just as Lu Yu described teatime as “a moment in the rhythm of the day when prince and peasant share the same thoughts and same happiness.”

Oddly, the history of taking cocaine as a distinct drug, based on the modern isolation of the chemical, begins with Sigmund Freud. When it was still a largely unknown drug, Freud wrote to Martha (his fiancée at the time): “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.”1 Freud felt sure he could come up with an application for the drug that would make him his fortune and allow him to marry. In one of those hmms of history, a guy that Freud turned on to cocaine, the ophthalmologist Leopold Konigstein, realized almost immediately that it could be used as a local anesthetic. He became rich; Freud did not. Freud gave the drug to another friend, this time specifically to help kick a morphine habit. This friend liked coke a lot and was dead from it a few years later. So Freud got out of promoting cocaine. But he had enjoyed it a great deal as a happiness tonic, and for all we know he may have continued to enjoy it, to balance those cigars. His study of the drug, On Coca, shows his fascination with its effects. I think his experience with cocaine is important evidence about how complex an assessment of cocaine needs to be. We tend to think of drugs as stupidifiers, and we may think so with good reason, but if we give it some thought, we know that drugs are also very interesting.

At the turn of the century, cocaine seemed like a good idea to a lot of people. It worked wonders for those allergic to pollen, who found they could calm their sinuses with a few sniffs, and it was a great relief for toothaches. Also, many advertisers did not shy away from noting that the drug would lift your spirits. From the 1860s to the 1920s there was cocaine in everything from teething remedies for babies, to adult allergy medications, to straightforward happiness tonics. The Boston Medical Journal said: “The moderate use of coca is not only wholesome but beneficial.” The New York Times reported that cocaine had “been applied with success in New York” to cure hay fever and toothache; and the Therapeutic Gazette noted the benefits of cocaine and explained, “A harmless remedy for the blues is essential.”2

When coca use started, and for millennia thereafter, it was mild and, within its area of influence, ubiquitous. It had a lot in common with how caffeine is used in our society. But in the late nineteenth century, coca’s contact with Western industrialism, consumerism, science, and transportation led to cocaine growing stronger and more available. At every stage of this development, people set different balances between this form of risk and this form of happiness. As the amount of cocaine in society skyrocketed and the potency of the drug grew in response to market demand, more people got addicted, and more people died. By the 1930s people were campaigning against cocaine use because