What is Cocaine?
The Incas probably were the first to use cocaine. Up to 5,000 years ago, they began to chew the leaves of the coca bush. Today the inhabitants of the Andes mountain still chew coca leaves mixed with lime from ashes. This natural source gives a low dose of cocaine with effects similar to drinking cups of strong coffee. People who chew coca leaves do not often have a serious addiction problem because there is so little cocaine in each leaf.
Cocaine could only be taken in leaf form until 1858, when it was isolated from the plant material by chemist Albert Niemann at the University of Gottingen in Germany. Shortly after it was purified, people began to inhale it into the nose ("snorting") and to inject it. Cocaine was added to various medicines and was an ingredient in Coca Cola until 1903.
The use of cocaine in its pure form led to the first major epidemic of cocaine use at the end of the 1800's and the beginning of the 1900's. At the beginning of that epidemic, as now, many people thought that cocaine was a harmless drug. As more and more people tried it and became addicted to it, it gained a reputation as a highly dangerous, very addictive drug. In the early 1900's, the terms "dope" and "dope fiend" were used to describe cocaine and the cocaine user who would do anything to get the next dose of cocaine. The drug's bad reputation combined with stricter laws against sales and possession led to less and less use of cocaine in the first few decades of the twentieth century. Sixty years after it began, cocaine use had practically disappeared by 1930.
In the 1960's cocaine again began to be seen as a harmless stimulant. "Freebasing", was developed, enabling users to convert the injectable white cocaine salts into a smokable form.
When coca leaves are harvested in Peru and Colombia, they are thrown into pits, chopped, pounded and mixed with gasoline, kerosene, and other chemicals to remove cocaine from the coca leaves. Cocaine comes out of the leaf in the freebase form. If it were left in this form for long it would lose its potency, so the cocaine freebase is mixed with other chemicals to convert it into a salt form. The salt form may be shipped long distances or stored for a long time without losing its strength. The salt form is the form used by doctors to produce local anesthesia for minor surgery.
Drug abusers know that they can inject the salt form but cannot smoke it. If the drug user wants to smoke cocaine, he mixes the cocaine salt with chemicals to convert it back to its freebase form. This second process is known as "freebasing" and is very dangerous because of the chemicals used to do it. The comedian Richard Pryor was severely burned on the face when the chemicals he was using to make freebase cocaine exploded and burned. Other less famous people have suffered serious injury or death in this process.
The current cocaine epidemic seemed to be leveling off in 1984, but a new and easily made form of cocaine called "crack" was developed at that time. Crack is nothing more than freebase cocaine which has been prepared by a different method. The method used to produce crack allows the freebase cocaine vapors to penetrate deeply into the lungs. This produces a greater high, but is also an even more addictive way to use cocaine. Crack smoking can also cause severe lung damage. With the advent of crack, the high costs of cocaine came down. Cocaine use increased even further. Today we are experiencing the largest epidemic of cocaine use ever recorded. According to a recent estimate, "one of two Americans between 25 and 30 have tried cocaine." It is currently mentioned more frequently than any other drug, including alcohol, as a reason for treatment in hospital emergency rooms.
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