Cocaine has taken a dive in respectability of late, but if you troll through the history of the drug you come to find that once it was highly regarded by doctors and the medical profession at large.
While Cocaine was synthesised as far back as 1855, it was a little later when the famous psychologist Sigmund Freud became the first big name to bring the drug into the main stream when he began recommending it as a tonic for depression and impotence. Many medical uses for the drug were tried such as using it for local anaesthesia and also as part of the treatment for recovering morphine addicts. Other ailments for which cocaine was used included asthma, sea-sickness, altitude sickness and morning sickness! Towards the end of the 19th century, many medical tracts warned of overuse of cocaine leading to “cocaine mania.”
When in 1886, Coca Cola was born, the drug got a further boost to its mainstream reputation as the main ingredient of the new drink which went on to become the biggest selling soda in history. In its early years however, it also had a lot of competition from other elixirs that all used the coca plant as an ingredient to make promises of various health benefits to their consumers. Many were quite successful commercial ventures.
The popularity of Cocaine was driven in the mainstream as it came to have many famous users who suffered very few social repurcussions as a result. Many even promoted its effects to the general public. Of course, at the time, cocaine was widely used and quite legal, though beginning to experience somewhat of a negative stigma due to increasing knowledge of problems associated with its use.
With the increasing popularity of the drug, came an increasing awareness of its pitfalls. People were succeptible to addiction from habitual use and all of the negative consequences of the drug. Social pressures actually forced the Coca Cola company to remove cocaine from its list of ingredients in 1903. With continued abuse of the drug, various negative effects continued to be felt with the first cases of nasal damage from Cocaine recorded in US hospitals in 1910.
By 1920, the US government added Cocaine to its list of banned narcotics under mounting social pressure. Many people blame the late response by the government to the problem of cocaine for many of the problems we have with the drug to this day. By waiting so late to act against the drug, a market for the narcotic was able to be established - something that a law is unable to combat (or so the argument goes).