Options on opiates...

...although not literally opiates, (although heroin does get a mention later) this is the South American equivalent - as in drug and addiction equivalent, not in effects as they are widely different.

Cocaine is extracted from the plant called Erythroxylon coca, and other species containing lesser quantities of ‘cocaine’, and is a local anesthetic and central nervous system stimulant. It can be taken by chewing on coca leaves, smoked, inhaled ("snorted") or injected; E.coca is to cocaine as poppies/opium are to heroin/morphine (morphine is the active ingredient in opium).
By the turn of the twentieth century, the addictive properties of cocaine had become clear to many; in 1903, the American Journal of Pharmacy stressed that most cocaine abusers were “bohemians, gamblers, high- and low-class prostitutes, night porters, bell boys, burglars, racketeers, pimps, and casual laborers.”….nice. It was finally made illegal in 1914 but the law incorrectly referred to cocaine as a narcotic, and this misclassification still exists today: as stated above, cocaine is a stimulant, not a narcotic: a narcotic is an addictive drug that reduces pain and induces sleep (and may alter mood or behavior) - such state is narcosis - derived from the Greek word narkotikos.

Early Spanish explorers noticed how the native people of South America were able to fight off fatigue by chewing on coca leaves. This led eventually to a medical account of the coca plant being published in 1569 and almost 3 centuries later , in 1860 - after several failed attempts mainly due to lack of chemical technologies - Albert Neiman, a PhD student at Göttingen Uni in Germany, isolated cocaine from the coca leaf and described the anesthetic action of the drug; his dissertation titled Über eine neue organische Base in den Cocablättern (On a New Organic Base in the Coca Leaves), is now in the British Library…he got his PhD too!

Afterwards, various medicinal wines became available and later, in the USA, John Pemberton developed a non-alcoholic version, Coca Cola, a drink that contained cocaine and caffeine; no coke in ‘Coke’ since 1906.

In 1879 cocaine began to be used to treat morphine addiction and was introduced into clinical use as a local anaesthetic in Germany in 1884, about the same time as Sigmund Freud published his work Über Coca, in which he wrote that cocaine causes:

...exhilaration and lasting euphoria, which in no way differs from the normal euphoria of the healthy person...You perceive an increase of self-control and possess more vitality and capacity for work....In other words, you are simply normal, and it is soon hard to believe you are under the influence of any drug....Long intensive physical work is performed without any fatigue...This result is enjoyed without any of the unpleasant after-effects that follow exhilaration brought about by alcohol....Absolutely no craving for the further use of cocaine appears after the first, or even after repeated taking of the drug...

He recommended cocaine for a variety of illnesses and for alcohol and morphine addictions with the conclusion that many of his patients went on to become addicted to cocaine....a Freudian slip!

In 1909, the great explorer Ernest Shackleton and his teams in Antarctica took cocaine tablets, the brand was “Forced March”, clearly marketed to fight fatigue; as did Captain Scott a year later on his ill-fated journey to the South Pole

The following, which I read and saved was reported in The Observer last year; not really sure why I chose to post it now, especially with what Augustus has been telling us lately - perhaps it's the surroundings I find myself in. Anyway, the article:

"This is when your lungs get fucked,' the cook splutters as he unscrews the top of a plastic bottle and carefully pours hydrochloric acid into the brown liquid. Gun tucked in his waistband, he reacts nervously to any sound, even the chickens rooting through the undergrowth. We have been told to run if any shooting starts but are not sure where to. At the bottom of the bowl, the acid and the brown liquid start to turn white. A minute in the microwave, and we have a kilo of cocaine."

"We are in the depths of the Peruvian jungle watching coca leaves being converted into one of the most potent commodities on the planet. Using a few leaves, lime, alcohol and acid, cocaine costs about £500 a kilo to make. By the time it reaches the streets of Soho, supplemented with anything from aspirin to powdered glass, it weighs two kilos and is worth around £35,000, a profit of more than £34,000. "

Read the rest here: The White Stuff, Sunday January 9, 2005 The Observer. "Celebrated documentary-maker Angus Macqueen spent 18 months on the cocaine trail across Latin America from the dirt-poor valleys of Peru to the shanty towns of Rio. Here he recalls the journey that revolutionised his views and explains why he believes 'the dandruff of the Andes' should be sold in Boots."
The final few paragraphs:
"Just as with Colombia's civil war, all the social problems cannot be laid at the door of cocaine. But the white stuff feeds huge amounts of criminal money into the conflict. The picture, though not on the same scale, is much the same on British and American inner-city streets.
When we read about the rise of gun crime, the phrase 'drugs-related' is rarely far away as rivals battle for a piece of that £34,000-per-kilo profit. This journey has left me thinking the politically unthinkable. With an election looming, the Blair government has made the war on drugs a populist law-and-order priority, once again conflating the taking of drugs with the crime and violence that surrounds them. But it is the war itself that is the problem. The politicians rightly warn that demand will go up if it is legalised. It is not good but not the nightmare they summon up: neither cocaine nor heroin is a cancer. In quantities it destroys your nose and is bad for your brain, but it very rarely kills - unlike that other addictive plant we can use legally: tobacco. Nor is it a direct cause of violence, like alcohol. "
"Let's be honest. People try drugs, whether in the form of alcohol or pills, because they are fun. Tens of thousands of UK citizens regularly consume cocaine; hundreds of thousands more use other illegal drugs, completely discrediting the law. In his book Cocaine, Dominic Streatfield quotes the monetarist Milton Friedman: 'I do not think you can eradicate demand. The lesson we have failed to learn is that prohibition never works. It makes things worse not better.'
Streatfield quotes the extraordinary statistics involved in fighting cocaine and drugs. Here are a couple: over the past 15 years, the US has spent £150 billion trying to stop its people getting hold of drugs. In Britain and the US almost 20 per cent of the prison population is inside for drugs offences. So what is left? We can muddle on or we can legalise cocaine - and indeed all drugs. "
"This won't solve the social ills of poverty or inequality here or in Latin America but it would remove vast sums of money from the criminal world. We should allow the farmers to grow coca and sell it for decent prices direct to government-controlled factories which can produce a high-quality product. And then it should be sold over the counter from registered chemists such as Boots to anyone over 18 at a reasonable, taxed price that does not encourage a black market. At least then we will know it is pure. Then we must attack demand by using some of the millions saved to invest in education drives that are honest. Look how effective a generation of anti-smoking education has been in bringing the public behind stringent restrictions on smoking in public, but not an outright ban." "Yes, more people will try these drugs and there will be tragedies. But 30 years of the war on drugs have achieved almost nothing except to make a few people fantastically rich, to arm our inner cities, to criminalise a generation of users, and to leave tens of thousands of Latin Americans dead. As our cocaine maker in Peru happily told us, 'People want our cocaine because it is good and, for a while at least, makes them happy.' "
S.O. (as usual, all the pictures are links)