Essay on Cocaine Drug
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Cocaine
Pure as the driven snow, coursing through your body, it hits you all at once. What is this brick wall that will hit you like a hurricane, its cocaine and over 150 tons of it is shipped into the United States every year. A powerful stimulant that makes your heart race, your skin tingle, and your body temperature rise, cocaine has been referred to as “Americas star spangled powder and the champagne of drugs.”
First popularized in the Andes Mountain peoples villages, raw coca leaves were chewed throughout the day giving the working men that boost they needed. Fortunately, the Andess people did not tamper with the coca plant, and because they left it in its purest raw state it did not have the habit forming qualities its molecularly altered cousin cocaine has.
Italian Dr. Paolo Montagaza is the one responsible for turning the raw coca leaf into cocaine, its powdered cousin. The use of this powerful stimulant spread like wildfire and by 1900, 5% of Americans were addicted to some sort of drug, cocaine being amongst the most popular. Advertised and marketed as a cure-all drug, Americans were using cocaine to treat anything from migraines, toothaches, and rheumatoid arthritis to mental illnesses like manic depression.
Dr. Sigmund Freud, one of the worlds most renowned thinkers in the psychological society heavily endorsed the usage of cocaine as a treatment for morphine addiction as well as other mental illnesses. Freud documented his use of cocaine, recording the effects of cocaine on the body. After a period of time he was discredited when a study was done claiming that cocaine was responsible for the rash of violent behavior from African Americans. Claiming that cocaine caused violent behavior from African Americans, Aborigines, railway workers, and other lower class peoples, leading to many wealthy white women to be raped and harmed.
The Harrison Act of 1914 was the first law to begin the illegalization of habit-forming drugs, except for medicinal use. While the Harrison Act was created in hopes of decreasing the use of habit-forming substances, what it really did was create what is now a 400 Billion dollar black market for such drugs. We now no longer had casual use amongst Americans, we had full fledged addicts who went to great costs to get their fix.
While drug use slowed for awhile in the states Heroin and Cocaine came back on the scene in the 90s and continues to be a presence in America. As we create harsh laws, drug task force teams to combat illicit drugs all we are doing is creating a stronger, more powerful black market that lies beneath the surface, controlling circumstance with its dirty money. Until we come up with a way to rid us of the evils of illicit drugs we will continue to battle them in hopes to decrease overall use.