The Cocaine Connection: Coca-Cola, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes

How did we get cokeheads? Who would put cocaine in wine? Why do young men feel compelled to hang Scarface posters on their walls? Thanks for asking. We can lay the blame squarely at the feet of a soda, a psychiatrist, and a fictional detective. From there, it was just a hop, skip, and a bump to mayhem and racial panic.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous Crime is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Elizabeth Dunton Saron Brunette got a question for you, my friend, Yes, ma'am,
do you know what's ridiculous?

Speaker 3 (00:11):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (00:11):
I do.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Okay, Well I'm sitting over here, just honestly.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
I will let you know. Okay, So I like jokesters, tricksters.
The ultimate trickster is what one art historian called this artist,
Jen's Haunting. And he's from He lives in Copenhagen. All right,
he's a conceptual artist. He does like big sculptures. And

(00:36):
he had this one I head a thing about like
a sound piece where Turks told jokes in their native
language and then they played it in a public square
in Oslo. Okay, yeah, okay, you see where I'm going
with this anyway, this is not a mashup.

Speaker 2 (00:51):
Ps God, yeah, Bert I can cry if I want to.

Speaker 3 (00:57):
We we did actually get a lot of tips off
on this, but it's a good art kind of mini heist.
Where so this this haunting, he'd done a piece before
that had currency on it, money, and so a museum
gave him money to create two works with banknotes featured

(01:19):
all over these canvases. It was supposed to have four
hundred and ninety two five hundred and forty nine kroner,
which is equivalent to little, you know, sixty nine thousand
ballparking dollars, which is the average annual salary in Denmark.
And he was supposed to put it on this canvas
and oh my gosh, what a statement, and look at
this is what we make. So he goes. He goes though,

(01:42):
he's like, yeah, hold on, let me just work on this.

Speaker 4 (01:44):
I love that.

Speaker 2 (01:44):
Let me work with this, right, and he.

Speaker 3 (01:46):
Drives up in his little scooter whatever, scoot scoot. He
toodles up and walks in with two blank canvases and
is like, here are my pieces. And he said, they
said what and he said yeah, they're called take the
money and run. Oh yes, I heard of the just
gave him blank ones.

Speaker 2 (02:01):
I love this. He's like, I spent the money. Yeah, right,
there you go art.

Speaker 3 (02:04):
So that the museum was like, not funny, seriously, where's
the art. He's like, not funny, this is art.

Speaker 2 (02:09):
This is it. And so U say, Marcel, do this
is it?

Speaker 3 (02:12):
They said, we're supposed to turn back, like we're supposed
to get this money back, like we're going to be
able to take it off the canvases when.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
This I didn't see that in the paperwork.

Speaker 3 (02:20):
Yeah, So they took him to court and the court
said that he could keep forty thousand of those kroner
because that was what they were supposed to pay him.
But he had to give everything back and he's now
appealing it because he's like it is but art.

Speaker 2 (02:34):
Who's to say it was conceptual art?

Speaker 3 (02:37):
Yeah? That was my concept is I took your money
and a ran and that, my friend, is ridiculous.

Speaker 2 (02:43):
Oh my god, that's super ridiculous. That is thank you
laid one.

Speaker 5 (02:46):
Up for me.

Speaker 2 (02:47):
Well, if you got a second, I got one for you. Yes,
this story, it is wild. Are you ready to have
your mind the flippid all the time? Yeah, because this
is a story of how and why cocaine became the thing.
What Yeah, it's with this story, okay, elzb that comes
down to three iconic names, two brands, and a man. Okay, yeah.
Now what's when I was doing the research on this,

(03:08):
Well was truly wild is how these three and their
relationships to cocaine it changed not just recreational drug use forever,
but also how you and I and we mister and
Missus America and all the ships to see how we
think about ourselves and others? Oh yeah, did you know
that we can blame cocaine for the rise of Freudian
analysis and talk therapy? What?

Speaker 6 (03:29):
Okay?

Speaker 2 (03:50):
This is Ridiculous Crime, a podcast about absurd and outrageous capers, heists,
and cons. It's always ninety nine percent murder free and
one hundred percent ridiculous.

Speaker 3 (04:02):
You are correct, Elizabeth Zaren, all.

Speaker 2 (04:04):
Right, for reasons that make perfect sense. When we've discussed
cocaine comes up a lot in the show.

Speaker 3 (04:09):
Yeah, I guess.

Speaker 2 (04:12):
It's often of a ridiculous crime is because it inspires
ridiculous egos.

Speaker 3 (04:16):
It's just fuels ridiculous crimes. It's a subject as a
target of crimes.

Speaker 2 (04:22):
Yeah, it's both a motivator and the target. Yeah yeah,
So why did we start sniffing that demon white pattern.
I'm gonna tell you. They simply put the reason why
people do coke recreationally. It comes down to three names
that you know, you already know these folks, Sigmund Freud,
Coca Cola, and Sherlock Holms. Charlotte Okay said, like I said,

(04:44):
two brands and a man.

Speaker 3 (04:45):
Okay, let's start with a brand, a man, and a
fictional man.

Speaker 2 (04:49):
Sure, but Charlotte Colmes at this point is a brand. Okay,
I'm stretching it.

Speaker 3 (04:52):
Well, then two brands and okay this, No, I.

Speaker 2 (04:55):
Got it, a brand, a man and a fictional man.

Speaker 3 (04:57):
Okay, I like it better.

Speaker 2 (04:57):
Okay, I'll start with the first one. Up coke as
in Coca cola. Let's separate the fact from the fiction,
legend from the myth and uh also the coke from
the Kuba lever Now, Elizabeth, you ever heard of the
drink von Matriani?

Speaker 3 (05:12):
No?

Speaker 2 (05:12):
You ever heard of Queen Victoria? Not the cruise ship
the woman?

Speaker 3 (05:15):
Yeah, okay, we go way back.

Speaker 2 (05:17):
What about Thomas Edison?

Speaker 3 (05:19):
I know of him?

Speaker 2 (05:19):
Ulysses S. Grant, Yes, you like to read? Yes, you
like the playwright Heinri Gibson. Yes, what about Jules Verne?

Speaker 3 (05:26):
Yes?

Speaker 2 (05:27):
Okay, you're also a former Catholic. So you ever heard
of Pope Leo the thirteenth?

Speaker 3 (05:31):
Yes?

Speaker 2 (05:32):
Can you guess what all of these folks have.

Speaker 3 (05:35):
Little sniffers?

Speaker 2 (05:36):
No, they all publicly exclaimed the virtues of drinking red
wine laced with cocaine. Oh god, yeah, the Holy Roman Father,
Pope Leo the thirteenth. He was a particularly big fan.
He said that Juan Marianni, the brand name for Cocaine
red wine, was perfect for those times when quote, when
prayer was insufficient.

Speaker 3 (05:54):
Wait, okay, stop, okay, So he just still sprinkle me,
sprinkle me into the red wine.

Speaker 2 (06:00):
And he's like, Jesus makes better wine.

Speaker 3 (06:02):
Is like this, this is I can do anything now.

Speaker 2 (06:04):
Yeah exactly.

Speaker 3 (06:05):
He's like, this is a nightmare.

Speaker 2 (06:08):
So what about old Tommy Edison. He was also a
big fan of cocaine wine. He was like, look, the
electric lightbel ain't gonna invent itself. Daddy needs his cocaine wine.

Speaker 3 (06:16):
Cocaine I'm not. I'm not familiar with cocaine wine.

Speaker 7 (06:19):
I know.

Speaker 3 (06:19):
Again, that's terrifying.

Speaker 2 (06:21):
Also another big fan former Civil War General US President
Ulysses As Grant. He was a vall merryani man as well.
Grant known to be a drinker. He at the end
of his life when he's writing his memoirs, he tasted
some of this cocaine lace wine. He's like, we're gonna
get a barrel of this stuff.

Speaker 3 (06:37):
And it was always red wine. Doesn't you think it
would make sense to put it in white wine.

Speaker 2 (06:41):
Uh, if you were right, Yeah, if you're dumping like
just straight powdered.

Speaker 3 (06:45):
And also just the vibe of a buttery shard.

Speaker 2 (06:48):
Yeah, smooth buttery shard. So you have all these incredible endorsements, right,
You got luminaries, queens, popes, writers, actresses like Sarah Barnhardt,
the big actress of the nineteenth century. Ers, you know,
war heroes. Everybody is saying, you gotta dry this cocaine wine.

Speaker 5 (07:04):
Right.

Speaker 2 (07:04):
It becomes a publicity gold mine. And it also launched
a cocaine craze.

Speaker 3 (07:09):
It was like the four Loco of the day exactly.

Speaker 2 (07:11):
This was the first cocaine craze. It starts out based
on this one humble, little scientific journal paper. Right. So
back in eighteen fifty nine, there was this chemist, Friedrich Wohler,
and he isolated the active ingredient in the coca leaf. Now,
that same year, an Italian scientist Paolo Mantegayza, he wrote
a paper about this strange South American plant called cocaine.
It's isolate cocaine. He was astounded with the potential for medicines.

(07:35):
He's like, oh, you can do everything with this stuff.
It's amazing. Right, French chemist. He reads this Italian scientist
paper about the coca plant and all of his medicinal
properties gives him ideas. He thinks to himself, what if
what if I were to pour some of this coca
into my wine? Huh so, and that Elizabeth was the
invention of the French dish coca van No, no, it's
chicken heay? Whatever is is with his idea? What if

(07:58):
it dumps of this cocain too? My revant? He was
like that became the brainchild of the French chemist Angelo Marianni.
So for his new beverage, he selected a fine Bordeaux wine,
a smart red with an earthy nose, and he laced
it with six milligrams of coca leaf per ounce of wine.
Oh yes, per ounce?

Speaker 6 (08:19):
What?

Speaker 2 (08:19):
And thus von Marianni.

Speaker 3 (08:21):
Was after himself. He's like, I can't feel my faith exactly, I.

Speaker 2 (08:25):
Can't even is he is my tief? So it was
called technically, the official name was von Tolnique Marianni a
lacuca du perout okay right, So it was sold as
the DJ stif and appartif it was built as an
energy boosting tonic. It's just everything to anybody. Cocaine wines
were even sold as safe for French kids. Now do
you understand French kids were already drinking wine, So it's

(08:46):
just a cocaine that was new. So anyway, the year
at this point, we're in eighteen sixty three when he
invents his cocaine wine. So this new drink, which I said,
it's heavily marketed right around the world. Vall Marianni becomes
this huge hit. You've seen posters of von Marianni, big
now poke styled things. Yeah, most likely embtting you've seen
what Now the Queen of the British Empire, the head

(09:07):
of the Catholic Church, they're both saying coke wine is it?
So what do the people do? Everyone's like, oh, this
is amazing. Then medicine comes along. There's this wave of doctors.
They start singing the praise of cocaine wine. In the
journal Medical News. This was from eighteen ninety it reported
quote that no recognized medical preparation has received stronger endorsement
at the hands of the medical profession. So eventually America

(09:29):
gets his grubby little hands on medical cocaine and coke wine,
and you know, then we start doing we do best.
We turned it into big business. Yeah, so what it
first started out is snake oil, Like you know, the
base side. We talked about the ancient Chinese medicines in
the West. Eventually these turn into patent medicines, and these
patent medicine ingredients were later replaced with cocaine because they're like,
why do we got to put it in whiskey and

(09:50):
a bunch of sugar. We just put it into cocaine.
So then all of a sudden, boom, almost all the
patent medicines are cocaine and morphine are laudanum based.

Speaker 4 (09:56):
Right.

Speaker 2 (09:56):
Eventually this blossoms into a whole industry of health tonics
and vitality restoring elixirs and all that kind of stuff. Right,
many of these, as I said, if you drew huge
doses of cocaine, and so much so that when von
Marianni wanted to import his cocaine wine, he had to
up the amount of cocaine he put his wine. Yes, exactly.

(10:16):
So the thing about how Von Marianni was like how
why it was such a kick to the spirit, if
you will, was the cocaine would be metabolized by the wine. Okay,
you're ready for little chemistry.

Speaker 3 (10:28):
Elizabeth always sciences and me, oh my god, love each other.

Speaker 2 (10:34):
Two fingers in one glove.

Speaker 3 (10:35):
I mean, I have not met a science class. I
couldn't fail.

Speaker 2 (10:40):
So the active ingredient in red wine is ethanol. That's
a type of alcohol, right, So ethanol can also be
used as a solvent. So this solvent then can extract
what we think of as cocaine from the coca leaf, right,
and then it kind of will suspend the cocaine in
the red wine. So what that means is that when
you drink the von Marianni, the coca leaf and the
red wine, they create this new third chemical compound called

(11:03):
coca ethylene. This is informed in the liver as you
metabolize the coke wine. And this is what gave vall
Mariani it's powerful kick, this cocaine coc ethylene. It gives
also crazy euphoria inducing qualities. It's like cocaine and wine
formed a wonder twins like situation. Right. So unfortunately, and

(11:24):
I don't know sadly of who you say, if you
were a fan of vall Marianni, the inventor Angelo Marianni,
he made one big mistake. He forgot to pass on
his recipe to his descendants. So his coke wine fell
out of production as soon as he drops test his
secret of the cocaine wine went to his grave with him.
I do not know if he died of a heart attack.
Pro I have to I have to consort with my sources,

(11:45):
but I can't tell you right now. Interesting anyway, his
creation right it inspires the Americans. As I told you,
one American in particular, You're gonna turn this into a
great empire, a cocaine wine health tonic. This American, he
was a morphine junkie, a former Civil War veteran on
the losing side. His name John Pemberton. He creates Pemberton's
French Wine right now. The year at this point, we're

(12:07):
into eighteen eighty five. Now, Angela Marianne's I told you
the original formula for cocoa wine, he'd featured six milligrams
of cocaine per fluid ounce. But when you wanted to
costell to the Americans, he had to bump it up
to seven point two milligams per rounce. So Pemberton's just
like he's clocking right those same types of numbers.

Speaker 3 (12:24):
I'll see you and raise you to nine.

Speaker 2 (12:26):
He's like, that's not enough. I need a little some
extra to give a little more kick, a little more
pep in your steps. So he drops in colon nuts.
That's his big secret, So heavy cocaine and caffeine and
it's just euphoria. So he's now got a supercharged cocaine wine,
extra caffeine. He calls Pemberton's French Wine instant hit. Now.

(12:47):
A year later, the Atlanta town fathers a passed legislation
to make Atlanta Fulton County go dry the whole areas.
No liquor is being sold. So it's one of the
first prohibition laws. The South was way ahead of the
nation on this. No old Pemberton he has to immediately
eighty six the wine from his new drink. So what
does he do? He does it. He just says, I
got to hit on my hands. I I gotta like,
what am I gonna do? What I'm gonna do? He goes, ah,

(13:09):
I got it. I'll make a carbonated tonic. So he
makes this carbonated version of his cocaine wine and he
calls it coca cola.

Speaker 4 (13:16):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (13:17):
So that's the coca for the cocaine and the cola
for the cocaine wine part was now gone, and so
next comes new legislation, federal laws. Nineteen oh six, the
US Congress passes the Pure Food and Drug Act. Right,
This was because of all the patent medicines. People were
dropping dead from going blind, the limbs were falling off.
They're like, we gotta come up with a loss. That
they come up with basically the USDA's initial There's also

(13:39):
other factors. We'll talk about this later. Anyway, this was
basically a response to primarily muckraking journalists of the day.
They did all his work to expose the unsanitary conditions
and like the factory meat production places like the Chicago
meat factories think Upton singing players the jungle. Yeah, okay,
So that book was published in nineteen oh six. This

(14:00):
becomes huge trouble for Coca Cola when they now passed
laws in nineteen oh six for this Pure Food and
Drug Act. Because people are so horrified by this book,
they're like, we need new laws. Coca Cola's like, damn it,
our cocaine. Right, So then an even worse blow comes
in nineteen fourteen, cocaine has made fully illegal in the US.
So they're like, what are we going to do now?
Our whole product line is based on this. You can't
buy it without a doctor's prescription. We can't get all

(14:22):
of our customers doctor's prescriptions. Yeah, what are we going
to do? So they're like, well, we'll have to get
a doctor's note for the company. So this point, Coca
Cola had been enduring a decades long fight to secure
its supply of coca leaves. It was ready to fight
for its coca leaves. So they've been primarily importing them
from Peru, but they had been also experiencing all sorts
of crazy ideas. At one point, they decided they would

(14:43):
try to grow their own coca. So they went and
they bought up this land and they created these secret
coca farms in Hawaii.

Speaker 3 (14:49):
Oh really Yeah, But.

Speaker 2 (14:50):
They found that they were much better being a drinkmaker
than a coca farmer. So they're like, mix that right.
So then the cocaine prohibition said, say, and I tell
you cocaine, where's Coca Cola gonna get their So they
sound a new way to secure their coca supplier. They
sought out a new business partner, the US government at
the time. The President of Coca Cola was a man
named Asa Candler. He's also the first to change coke

(15:13):
secret formula. He took out the cocaine. He's the guy, right,
So in his place, he came up with decoconized coca leaves.
So yeah, the active part of the cocaine was taken out,
leaving only the flavor of the coca leaf. So he
works with legislators in Washington and aisen Kandler. He made
sure Coca Cola was exempted from any current prohibitions, any
future prohibitions, and Coca Cola's lobbying efforts payoff. New laws

(15:35):
are drafted, Coca Cola is exempted. There's a provise on
the law that allows the drink maker to use quote
decoconized coca leaves or preparations made therefrom or to any
other preparations of coca leaves that do not contain cocaine. So,
to this day, Coca Cola has the same supplier of
its decoconized coca leaves, Maywood Chemical Works in Maywood, New Jersey,

(15:56):
one of two companies that was grandfathered in under this law.
Still the taste of the coca coca, but just no cocaine,
No active ingredient to get you hot.

Speaker 3 (16:04):
And so that's part of that like secret recipe.

Speaker 2 (16:06):
Part of the secret recipe.

Speaker 3 (16:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (16:07):
So this chump from the company may Would Chemicals. This
is they're located like ten miles from Manhattan. They're not
like I mean, they're in New Jersey. It's part of
like that New Jersey chemicy the corridor that I always
make fun of. But anyway, the company, it continues to
stay to legally import and process copious amounts of cocaine
and it's all sitting there in New Jersey in the Atlantic.
In two thousand and three, they reported on this Maywood
Chemical works. Uh huh at the time in two thousand

(16:30):
and three, they imported three hundred and eighty five thousand
pounds of coca leaf and.

Speaker 3 (16:35):
The cocaine they take out. What do they do with that?

Speaker 2 (16:37):
That would have been if they would have turned into cocaine,
that was about two hundred million dollars worth of cocaine.

Speaker 3 (16:41):
That's what. So what do they do? Just flush it
down the twill?

Speaker 2 (16:43):
They incinerate it. Apparently, that's that's the story.

Speaker 3 (16:47):
So like the local Nerdwelt climbs.

Speaker 2 (16:51):
I think they do it and like pressurize anyway. I
do not have an answer for how they get rid
of the cocaine that they isolate.

Speaker 3 (16:57):
That's yeah.

Speaker 2 (16:58):
But answer to your question of can you even taste
the cocaine Coca Cola, they say it's perceptible. They say
that it's very actually important flavor. And then when you
take it out, people are like this.

Speaker 3 (17:07):
This is what is it tastes like? Isolated?

Speaker 2 (17:10):
Yeah, I'm curious what wine cocaine tastes likes. That's your
cocaine wine. That's personally Yeah, that was the first cocaine crase.
Coca Cola popularized it, and so did Von Marianni. Now
let's peel back the curtain for the next big name
in cocaine segment, Freud. But first, well they can break Elizabeth.
I know you need to cool down and we'll be back.

Speaker 3 (17:29):
Into class cocaine wine.

Speaker 2 (17:51):
All right, Elizabeth, Saron, we're back.

Speaker 3 (17:54):
We're back.

Speaker 2 (17:54):
Now. You may be wondering, Saron, we're talking.

Speaker 3 (17:56):
Cocaine, Saron, we're talking cocaine.

Speaker 2 (17:58):
Where is the crime? Yeah, where's you somehow have cocaine
but no crime?

Speaker 3 (18:01):
How is that possible?

Speaker 2 (18:03):
I'm like, fair enough, Elizabeth, that is a fair point.
The Coca Cola was able to change the laws, so
what they did was not illegal. So we've just barely missed. Yeah,
just throw it around it right. Well, so far there,
we've only been kind of ridiculous. For more ridiculousness, let's
talk Siggy Freud, father of the the ego, the super egos,
talk therapy, dream therapy aka Freudian analysis, the whole bit.

Speaker 5 (18:25):
Right.

Speaker 2 (18:25):
Freud, as it turns out, was a big time and
I mean huge cocaine.

Speaker 3 (18:28):
Really, yes, I feel like I kind of knew that
you might have heard about.

Speaker 2 (18:32):
It's like something you hear in the college dorm room,
Like you know sigmand Freud, you like cocaine, You know
the professor mentioned in class and they tell you have
the story.

Speaker 3 (18:38):
Oh my god. It's like when someone takes a philosophy
class then you have to hear about maybe we're brain
in a jar. Get over it, dude, anyway, go ahead.

Speaker 2 (18:47):
So Freud to frame it in modern terms, Freud was
the kind of cocide whould make Stevie Nick say.

Speaker 3 (18:53):
Damn son, oh really?

Speaker 4 (18:54):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (18:54):
Froyd was the kind of coked whould make John Belushi nervous?

Speaker 3 (18:57):
Did he have someone blow it up? As dude.

Speaker 2 (19:01):
Well, not quite. He didn't get to there, but it
gets pretty the white witch, yo, Yeah, that's how she
got it. When she blew out her nose. He blew
out his nose too, we did. That's how much he
loved cocaine, just like Stevie Nicks. To see Sigmund Freud,
He's essentially why we have recreational cocaine. Really one man,
almost single handedly, Freud made cocaine a thing. He's like,
cocaine's a thing now thanks to Freud. But how how

(19:25):
did Freud do it? Elizabeth? Great question?

Speaker 3 (19:27):
Thank you.

Speaker 2 (19:27):
Now remember how I told you about that academic paper
about cocaine, the French chemist Angelo Marianni. He reads it
and he's like, well, he wasn't the only one to
read it. Not just cocaine wine spurned from that. Freud
also he peeped academic papers. He read that. When he
read others and a bunch of the medical minds, they
all were coming to cocaine and seeing potential.

Speaker 7 (19:44):
Is it?

Speaker 2 (19:44):
He was part of this early wave of adopters. So
who were these early coke lovers of academia? Elizabeth desperate,
You're just hot with the questions. I am I'm just loving. Well,
let's start with my man, Carl Caller. That's with a
K and see Carl K. Caller, right, he was a
twenty seven.

Speaker 3 (20:00):
Year old with a K collar with a K. Please
don't let his middle name be Kevin.

Speaker 2 (20:06):
No, no, he's a German. So when he decided to
experiment with cocaine compounds, who did he decide to experiment on, Elizabeth?

Speaker 3 (20:12):
Monkeys himself.

Speaker 2 (20:15):
He's like, I don't have money for monkeys. I got
money for Carl and some cocaine. He wanted to see
how cocaine worked as an anesthetic. That was the big
deal originally, right, So you know what that's used for now?
That was its original purpose. Yes, it remains so. And
so it's he and a colleague. They made up a
cocaine solution and then Coler loaded up his eyeballs with

(20:35):
the solution like eye dropper. He did like an eye
dropper thing there. So he found that it numbed his eyeballs,
like he totally worked as an anesthetic, right, and so
the tested he had his colleagues shoved pins into his eyeballs.
But Elizabeth, good news is he couldn't feel the pins
shoved into his eye when I'm imagining cocaine work.

Speaker 3 (20:53):
I have this problem that when I see like footage
of someone getting hurt, or like someone describes something some
sort of injury toil, I imagine it like I get
like sharp pains in my legs.

Speaker 2 (21:06):
I'm sorry, you're such an EmPATH. I know I'm afraid
to get that.

Speaker 3 (21:09):
So like when you talk about that, I'm trying not
to imagine it, and I say all sorts of horrific
things because I had when I describe violent things, it's
a cartoon.

Speaker 2 (21:18):
Yes, I've noticed that about you. Cartoonized.

Speaker 3 (21:20):
But like, especially like if I see one of those
videos where like someone jumps a bike off something and
then slams into a wall, I get like sharp pains
in my legs.

Speaker 2 (21:28):
Is that I think you're very empathetic. You're basically feel
their pain in a sense, or at least your mirror
neurons imagine your mirror motor neurons go, oh, this is
what it would feel like, and then you experience.

Speaker 3 (21:40):
I think I haven't so.

Speaker 2 (21:41):
Kelly Slater learned to surf a bunch really well in
Florida's He watched all these videos and just thought about
what they would do. And just wastely worked his muscles
on other people's waves.

Speaker 3 (21:48):
Huh, well, I just think I have like an excess
quantity of woosy in my body.

Speaker 2 (21:53):
I don't want to teach you about it.

Speaker 3 (21:54):
But you know, I'm embarrassed by No, you.

Speaker 2 (21:56):
Shouldn't be embarrassed. It's a good quality. And that is, honestly,
how we became such a great spece is our ability
to feel and to learn from.

Speaker 3 (22:01):
Other except for if you have cocaine in your eyes
and you can't feel exactly.

Speaker 2 (22:06):
This was as a good transition to Elizabeth. Huge news
for surgeons. We can now knock out. This is basically
the first use of local antisset.

Speaker 3 (22:14):
I've had eye surgery. By the way, I wish they
would have done this. I've don't want to It would
have been better than what I had going on.

Speaker 2 (22:23):
Yeah, well, this is how an alley with a brick
anesthetic was a brick anyway, you can numb an area
of the body without putting a person all the way under.
That's the genius of local anesthetic because people still die
from going under, so there's a dangerous So if you
have cocaine, you're like, oh, this helps us. This is great. Right,
So before Coke met Kohler's eyeballs, doctors had to rely

(22:44):
on chloroform. Ether it's kind of like clumsier versions. So
soon enough medical profession they love it. They start saying
in the praises of cocaine, it's all over academia. But
the public doesn't know about this. They're not up on
the latest anesthetics. So Robert Bartholow you wrote in eighteen
ninety one about how it spread through medicine. Quote, no
remedy in modern times, probably in any age of the world,

(23:06):
has become so famous since so short a time as cocaine,
and no remedy has so soon been subjected to the
test of physiological experiment and clinical observation. Right, cocine is
it now? Let's not get it twisted though, right as
Europeans didn't discover cocaine, not anymore than they discovered the Americas.
Because in South American societies and cultures, cocaine was a
staple crop. It was revered as a gift from the gods.

(23:28):
It was praised for its medicinal properties. It was very
well known, but it was not used recreationally.

Speaker 3 (23:33):
No, didn't they chew on it?

Speaker 2 (23:34):
From on the lea. Yeah, when they wanted to stamina energy,
long hikes on hunts. You know, it was used as
a performance enhancing drug essentially.

Speaker 3 (23:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (23:42):
No, it was the Europeans who turned cocin into a
recreational drug, just sitting around getting high on a couch. Right.
So in the nineteenth century European scientists they got really
good at isolating the active ingredients of plants. So in
eighteen oh three it started with morphine. They had isolated
it from opium or so from the poppy plant. And
then eighteen twenty along comes caffeine. In quinine, they're isolated,
very important, especially quinine from malaria. In eighteen twenty eight

(24:07):
virgina tonics. Eighteen twenty eight, nicotine is isolated. And so
then when you start making a lot of pesticides out
in nicotine, oh yeah, that's in eighteen fifty nine science
isolates the active ingredient from coca leaves. And so then
I told you that same year Paulo Manka is that
he writes his paper examining the properties of cocaine, launching
off all the cocaine wine. But he also, as I said,

(24:28):
inspired all these medical people. Right, So in his experiments.
He documented the experiments, and he wrote in his documentary
quote God is unjust because he made man incapable of
sustaining the effects of coca all life long. I would
rather live a life of ten with coca than one
of one hundred one thousand without it.

Speaker 3 (24:46):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (24:47):
These people are like they are looked, yes, exactly now,
like they're just about it right, Like Mary and Barry
would be like, man, you need to calm down, like
real though, So that first paper would not only spy,
as I said, the French chemist to make cocoine, but
also inspired the Viennes medical student looking for a path
to wealth and fame akas Ziggy Freud. Now, but at first, Elizabeth,

(25:07):
I one more doc for you. Enter William Halstead. You
know who William Halstead is. He's the fatherner of modern surgery. Okay, right,
so he's like it all basically traces back to him
and his like ideas about like what if we put
him under what if we like wash your hand?

Speaker 3 (25:20):
And I'm sure you love him because you love surgery websites.

Speaker 2 (25:24):
I do.

Speaker 3 (25:24):
This is a lot of times when you come in
here to headquarters and you'll be giggling and you'll say
look at this, and you'll show me something, and then
my legs.

Speaker 2 (25:35):
It goes back in the body of like he's been degloved.
But they get it all back on anyway, my man,
he was, as he said, father modern surgery. He also
goes all in on cocaine and the anesthetic properties of
cocaine because as a surgeon, this is huge for him, right.
So the problem though for him was cocaine messed him
up like he was an eighties pop star. Halstead he's

(25:57):
working in New York at the time as a surgeon.
But then he starts doing too much stuff experimentation like
all the others, and he starts not showing up at
work at the hospital. He starts to fail to show
up for teen exactly. He gets so bad that one
day he shows up for work as a surgeon in
a busy New York hospital, lots of people. Everyone's like,
oh frantic, there's blood on the floor. He's coked up
to the gills. He tries to operate, he can't trust

(26:18):
his surgeon's hands. He backs away from the patient right
and he says, I can't operate. He then son he
walks out of the operation theater. He goes home and
he's like, I need to do more cocaine about it.
This is terrible.

Speaker 3 (26:32):
Get that'll fix it.

Speaker 2 (26:33):
He then spends the next seven months in alone in
his apartment getting high on his miracle drug.

Speaker 3 (26:38):
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (26:39):
Yeah. Finally, in eighteen eighty six, Ill said's like, I
think I have a problem. He checks into Butler Hospital.
It's good for him, producer Dave's hometown of Providence, Rhode Island.
So he got treated for cocaine addiction, you know, and
so he gets released. But unfortunately he was not able
to get that monkey off his back. He went on
to become a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine,
teaching all these new doctors what he's created, these new

(27:02):
ways of surgery. And while he's doing this, he's also
blowing rails of.

Speaker 3 (27:05):
Coke, Like while he's teaching class. I like to imagine that.

Speaker 2 (27:09):
This is Chuck. Don't worry about it, Chuck so Halsted.
He's never able to get free of the cocaine monkey
on his back. He was just one of the early
cautionary tales now of the hour.

Speaker 3 (27:19):
He I mean, he got his life back together though.

Speaker 2 (27:22):
Yeah, he was able to get his career back together.
That was about it. Everything else kind of Feld to this.
It was a rough one for old Uh yeah, Halsted,
Now are man of the hour. Zicky Freud the godfather
of recreational cocaine. Now I'm not being facetious when I
say this, Elizabeth, Yes, sorry to god. Dominick straight failed
the author of Cocaine, an unauthorized biography. He's the guy
who literally wrote the book on cocaine. Literally, so anyway,

(27:44):
he wrote this his book Cocaine quote that if there
is one person who could be held responsible for the
emergence of cocaine as a recreational pharmaceutical, it was Freud.
It's not just me. It's also straight film anyway. As
I know, earlier, all the time cocaine was still legal.
So this is we're in a legal phase right at
the time. I'm Freud and his coke had medical buddies.
They're doing legal, pharmaceutical grade cocaine, not street cut stuff.

(28:05):
They're just doing like straight from like the pharmacists right now,
if you can believe it, Freud first started doing coke
to treat nasal lesions. He had these sores in his
nose and he found the cocaine numb the pain.

Speaker 3 (28:16):
Why did he have so he.

Speaker 2 (28:18):
Didn't tell me, and then he noticed it. It made
him feel really good, like really good.

Speaker 3 (28:23):
He's like, all these ideas.

Speaker 2 (28:26):
To keep doing that, right, So I think Freud would
agree that cocaine is likely the favorite drug of the ego. Yeah,
So anyway, he orders up some of the more cocaine.
He starts to experiment on himself, because that's just what
you do. He receives his first delivery from quote Angels Pharmacy.
That's what's the spot. The year is eighteen eighty four,
one year of cocaine. Later, in eighteen eighty five, Freud
ready to go public with his new love. He's like,
let's make this Facebook official. So he wrote a medical

(28:48):
treatise called uber Coca. All right, just right to the
point you described everything quote was the most gorgeous excitement.
He also wrote the quote if fun works intensive while
under the influence of coca, after three to five hours,
there is a decline in the feeling of well being,
and the further dose of coca is necessary in order
to ward off fatigue. Okay, so right, so Fredi discovered

(29:10):
what the users called the moors, right which is basically, oh,
I just want more code, right, But he argues that
this is not the case. He writes, quote, it seems
to me notimory that I discovered this in myself and
and other observers who are capable of judging such things.
At the first dose or even repeated doses of coca
produced no compulsive desire to use the stimulants. Further, on
the contrary, once he was a certain unmotivated aversion to

(29:31):
the substance, which is a total lie. I might keep
telling yourself that, Elizab, but you have to keep in
mind the time Freud was a young man. He was
one with a medical degree, but also he was importantly
Freud had a politically radical father. He had a big
shadow cast over him, and his father was ruining his
potential in a very conservative Vienna. Oh yeah, his professional

(29:51):
life was a nightmare thanks to Pops.

Speaker 5 (29:53):
Right.

Speaker 2 (29:53):
So Freud, he found the cocaine made all his worries
and anxieties go away, and thus he concluded the cocaine
would also be a perfect to give to morphine addicts.
So Freud first had learned about cocaine from a medical
journal called Therapeutic Gazette, so that's what kind of framed
his thinking. But the journal wasn't unbased science. This was
owned by a pharmaceutical company, Park Davis, which is now
a subsidiary offizer. Yeah, and anyway, as he started to

(30:15):
write about the joys of cocaine, the pharma company paid
Freud twenty four dollars to spread the good word of cocaine.
So now he's cocaine's poster boy, and it's pitch man. Anyway,
he goes on. Meanwhile, Fred, he starts to recommend it
to his colleagues at the university. He's recommending coke to
his friends, his family, people on the street. He even
told his fiance people, Yeah, you gotta try this cocaine.
Now I got some right here. Toll takes this. It say,

(30:36):
a good hand in my pocket. So Marta Burnet is
that's his fiance. He's writing to her these all these
letters because you know the time, you gotta write letters.
And in his letters just always cocaxed thish oh Man.
He's telling her like Freud relied on basically cocaine for
confidence and crucial moments, and he'd meet people he admired,
he'd want to impress him and well, Elizabeth, right than
me tell you about this. I'd like you to close

(30:57):
your eyes and to picture it as a close eighteen
eighty six on the continent Europe, to be exact. And
you are on a carriage ride, and this is a
delightful day. A soft greaze pushes the air around in
a fun, flirtatious way. The sound of the carriage wheels
and the horse hoofs is like a white noise machine.
That is, if you knew what one of those were.
You don't. It's the nineteenth century. They'd get to be invented. Anyway.
You're on this carriage ride, Elizabeth, with you as a

(31:19):
young Sigmund Freud, and you, Elizabeth, are tight with Freud.
I mean so tight because you are the cocaine monkey
on his back, not a literal cocaine money. No, no, no,
you were Freud's voice of addiction.

Speaker 3 (31:30):
But I thought I was cocaine.

Speaker 2 (31:31):
Yeah. No, you are the voice of Freud's voice of addiction.
At the moment you and the young doctor are on
your way to see his mentor and teacher of the
French psychiatrist Jean Martin Carco. Of course, you've you've been
there with Freud days earlier, when he wrote a letter
to his fiance, reading it aloud to him. So you
recall how he explained his excitement to his fiance, saying,
Chako has invited me, along with Ratchetti, to visit him
at his home tomorrow Tuesday, after dinner. Many people will

(31:53):
be in attendance. You can easily recall the mix of
trepidation and elation in Freud's reading voices. He continued to
read it his own letter before sending it off. I'm
sure you can imagine my apprehension mixed with curiosity and pride.
White gloves, white tie and even a new shirt, a
visit to the barber for what little hair I have left,
and a little cocaine to loosen my tongue. That last
part was, of course your idea. You whispered that into

(32:16):
Freud's ear, feeling a little nervous, Siggie, you should do
some coke about it. And now the big day has come,
and Freud does as you suggested then and again now
you suggest he danced with that white devil you love
to whisper chaos into his ears. And the thing is,
Freud listens to you, out comes his little container of cocaine,
and with two snorts, Freud feels that familiar cool sensation

(32:37):
run down his spine. Oh, that sweet devil cocaine, you
whisper in his ear. Freud relaxes into the seat of
his carriage as the sounds of horses and carriage wheels
pull him even closer to his mentor's house. You whisper
in his ear again. Freud listens a little more cocaine.
What a good idea, he thinks, you know, to give him,
you know, what a little ease from his worries. Oh,

(32:59):
another mile or two to go. We're almost there. But
maybe there's just another time, a little bit of time
for maybe another Freud stays busy, getting high as giraffe
eyebrows in this carriage. He's like Vienna's Rick Ross at
this point, right, and you, Elizabeth, are so happy for him,
because chaos rains. Finally, the carriage arrives at the destination.
Just before the footmot hops down from the back and

(33:20):
comes around and opens the doors. Freud tops off. You've
now convinced Freud to get completely suited before walking into
the home of his mentor. At this point, you laughably
imagine Freud mashing his teeth side to side as he
dominates the conversation. Freud coming off like a yiked out hunter,
s Thompson. The carriage doors swing open, the footman offers
a hand to Freud, and you, giddy with excitement, ride

(33:41):
on Freud's back as he takes his first unsteady step
out of the carriage, off to see his mentor. How
much did Freud love cocaina live?

Speaker 3 (33:49):
Oh my god?

Speaker 2 (33:49):
How much did he rely on her? To Calmas social
anxiety one his own words. In another letter with his Boo,
Freud confided how he'd been doing so much below at
the time that he could hardly sleep. He said, I
was offering from migraines, the third attack this week, by
the way, although I'm otherwise in excellent health. I took
some cocaine, watched the migraines vanish at once, went on
writing my paper as well as it let to professional Mendo.
But I was so wound up that I had to

(34:11):
go on working and writing and couldn't get to sleep
before four in the morning. But I find it hilarious
about Freud's letters that the good doctor somehow misses the
fact that maybe, just maybe, his miracle drug is the
problem for him. He keeps saying, no, this is everything,
it's the best everything. It's the other things. I don't
know that hay fever and allergies. So he's like he's
got Pandora's box, right, big shiny box, and he's now
dumped it over like cocaine on Don Henley's glass top table.

(34:34):
He's just this is awesome. Anyway. Well, let's take a
little break, Elizabeth, and after this I'll be back to
tell you how Freud may cocaine further the thing, not
just for himself but for everybody.

Speaker 5 (34:44):
Oh no, Elizabeth, Oh Zaren.

Speaker 2 (35:07):
Do you know how Freud came up with his idea
for talk therapy cocaine? I mean, think about it. It
makes perfect sense. Oh yeah, yeah, what is like to do?
Talk about themselves, their preoccupations, their fears, their worries. Right,
of course a koke would invent talk therapy. Yeah, it's right.
Why do we miss this?

Speaker 3 (35:25):
Anyway?

Speaker 2 (35:26):
We have a Freud coked up like Kerry Fisher in
her prime, and he's got all these rich Viennese folks
swinging by his office and he's like, you need to
just open up and talk. Let it happen. You know what,
just like you say whatever you're thinking. And so this
is how cocaine's first spreads amongst the elite, right him
telling everybody how great it is, and they're like, oh, man,
I do feel better, and I don't even care about
my mother or whatever it is that their concern is. Meanwhile,

(35:48):
remember I said Freud thought coke would be the perfect
thing to give to a morphine addict to treat the addiction,
which is like the worst idea I could think of
to give a morphine joy other than morphine is the
cocaine habit. Anyway, Enter Freud's buddy or van Fleischel Maxau.
He was the aforementioned morphine junkie. He was also a
medical cata physiologist. He'd suffered a catastrophic thumb injury while

(36:08):
dissecting a corpse. The wound resulted in an infection followed
by an amputation that left him with nerve pain. So
he treated that with morphine quickly developed one hell of
a habit. Freud thought he had an answer to his
friend's trouble. He's like, you knowed you to maybe do
some cocaine about it? Right, So he treated him. How
I use that term loosely with copious amounts of cocaine.
So what happens to his buddy Elizabeth? Oh god, you

(36:31):
know what happens. He developed a cocaine habit like nobody's business.

Speaker 3 (36:34):
Yeah, he already has addiction issues, and.

Speaker 2 (36:37):
Now he's got a supplier who's pushing it on him,
literally pushing it.

Speaker 3 (36:40):
On Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (36:41):
And he starts doing so much coke he reaches toxic
levels in his body. Right, So Freud's therapy pland is
not working. His friend would eventually battle addiction for the
next seven years of his life until he died of
a premature death at age forty five.

Speaker 3 (36:52):
Wag Freud, Yeah, nice one.

Speaker 2 (36:54):
We're still was in. Freud, high on cocaine, became convinced
that his buddy, another buddy of his, a doctor, should
attempt a radical operation on one of his patients. You see,
his own nose, as I told you, have been severely congested,
just like Stevie Nicks. Now possibly you know from the
coke habit. So Freud undergone an operation where a doctor
sliced open one of his nostrils, cleared out all his
coke blockage and damage or whatever. And Freud thought that
his buddy could do the same thing on his patients.

(37:15):
He's like, yeah, just slice open her nose will be perfect.
Right oation gets botched, the woman suffers for the rest
of her life. Writes about this in his book The
Interpretation of Dreams, He records his own guilty dreams about
his patient Irma. The tragedy drives him to do way
more cocaine. I need to do cokebat it right. At
this point, he was doing so much coke. He was
experiencing regular chest pains, depression. He was doing so much

(37:37):
coke he nearly imploded his career, his marriage. He still
hadn't figured out that cocaine was to blame. He kept
thinking it might be something out. He can't be this
stuff that makes me feel awesome by that. He wouldn't
stop doing blow until eighteen ninety six, when his politically
radical father dropped dead. And you may recall that was
when he has original reason to start experimenting with his father.
His father dies. He quit the day after his father

(37:59):
was put in the ground. One day after his funeral,
He's like, I don't think I need cocaine anymore, you.

Speaker 3 (38:02):
Know, I wonder what Freud would say about it.

Speaker 2 (38:04):
I'm like, hey, tell me about your faza anyway. So
Freud he quits cocin eighteen ninety six. Later on, Freud
largely tried to bury his earlier enthusiasm, for he tried
to act like he'd never been Johnny cokeseed, we have
the receipts, right, it's there, right, So Freud he told
the whole world cocazette. Then he was like, no, never mind,
but people didn't hear that. Right. By that point it
had spread, right, Yeah, and uh, you know, even though

(38:25):
as I said, he quits, Pandora's box has been cracked
cracked up down. So now we have Coca Cola, we
have Freud. I told you one other one, who did
I say, Charlock Holmes. Well, Elizabeth, remember also I told
you cocaine was legal to the beginning of the twentieth century. Yeah,
this is very important to remember. So I'll get into
another story of another superfan of cocaine, Sherlock Holmes. Authors

(38:45):
Lester Grinspoon and James B. Bacalar, they co wrote a
book The Details the History of Cocaine, and they documented
its social evolution. Of course they got to Sherlock Holmes. Yeah,
because he loved that Bolivian marching powdery. As they wrote,
doctor Watson Doyle's narrator first mentions cocaine in The Sign
of the Flour, published in eighteen ninety. At that time,
Holmes was injecting a seven percent solution intravenously three times

(39:08):
a day, apparently a rather large dose, since Watson reports
asking when he saw Holmes with the needle whether it
was morphine or cocaine. Holmes seems to have had more
than one drug habit, but we have no more of
morphine from Watson. In the spirit of mock scholarship with
which Sirlock Holmes studies are conducted, we might guess that
Holmes is one of those addicts wo use cocaine to
withdraw from morphine and simply replace one drug with another.

(39:28):
Holmes admitted that cocaine was bad for him physically, but
found it transcendentally stimulating and clarifying to the mind. Now,
as the authors noted, Sherlock Holmes, he doesn't use cocaine
as a performance enhancing drug. He uses it to relax.
So again back to Greensman and Bacalar, they write that
Sherlock Holmes quote did not use it when working on
a case, but only did dispel boredom when he had
nothing to do. Now, it may surprise some folks to

(39:49):
learn that one of the great detectives of literature was
an out and out cocatine. Yeah, right, Does it surprise you?

Speaker 3 (39:53):
No?

Speaker 2 (39:54):
I mean, I mean you knew, right, I'd kind of
told you.

Speaker 3 (39:56):
Well, no, I've read it.

Speaker 2 (39:57):
You read a story.

Speaker 3 (39:58):
And their references in some of the adaptations like the film.

Speaker 2 (40:02):
Okay, yeah, some of the belts cover it. Yeah, but
they often gets dropped out. Yeah, anyway, to make their case,
the co authors, they documented all the appearances in all
of his books. And there's cocaine right from the first book,
all right. In a study in Scarlet, doctor Watson is
worried about his friend's co cabit, doesn't quite mention it
by name. It gets mentioned by name three years later
in the next book, The Sign of the Four, Watson

(40:22):
actually watches Holmes shoot up right, and he says, and
I quote Charlotte, Holmes took his bottle from the corner
of the mantelpiece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat
Morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers. He adjusted
the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt cuff.
For some little time, his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the
sinewy forearm and wrist, all dotted and scarred with innumerable

(40:45):
puncture marks. Finally, he thrust the sharp point home, pressed
down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet
lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction. Now to me,
that sounds like morphineus a cocaine.

Speaker 3 (41:00):
I was realized in reading it and then seeing I
always thought it was that Holmes was supposed to be
a morphine addict.

Speaker 2 (41:06):
Yeah, he speaks. Holmes specifically speaks to cocaine. He tells
the Good Doctor at one point, I suppose that it's
influence is physically a bad one. I find it, however,
so trendscendentally stimulating and clarifying to the mind, that its
secondary action is a matter of small moment. So he
basically says, I don't care, it makes you feel good. Yeah,
don't give me any So that's how the Great Detective

(41:27):
helped glamorize cocaine. He give it a patina of elegance
and sophistication similar to Freud right, but admittedly he didn't
have to worry about fetanol like the modern users do.
But even Victorian cocaine was still a no joke. It
was pharmaceutical great. But anyway, Elizabeth, you still may be wondering, Jaren,
where is the crime? You've kind of dogged. Yeah, it's
a fantastic question, Elizabeth to answer that. Let's bring it

(41:49):
back home to the US. Cocaine arrived in American soil
in eighteen eighty four as a medical supply. As I've
told you, right, it is mostly just with the doctors.
By then, who's being mass produced by European chemical companies
like Murk, And they're throwing it over this over the Atlantic, right,
this new wonder drug. It gets outlawed in its first
state three years later, in eighteen eighty seven, the state
of Oregon. At that point, all the new stories about

(42:11):
cocaine abuse were about doctors abusing it. So Oregon very
small state. They can't have their few doctors abusing it,
so they outlawed, Right, they're dipping into it. Two years later,
Montana outlawed cocaine without a prescription, So, just like Oregon,
it was more of an updated ban on their pre
existing laws against opium and morphine, which was a racist
preoccupation in the West because of Chinese laborers. Yeah, so Colorado.

Speaker 3 (42:32):
Sorry, it feels like cocaine though, was probably not prescribed
for people to take away from the office. I think
it was it because it seems like if the doctors
are getting busted for it, it's something that is.

Speaker 2 (42:44):
It's not being administered in the doctor's office. They were
being given various ways. There was like lozenges, there's gums,
there's there are shots that they're administering, but there's also powders.
There's a lot of different they're coming up. They don't
know how to best give it to people today.

Speaker 3 (42:57):
Isn't it mostly used in dentistry.

Speaker 2 (42:59):
Yeah, it's it's primarily an anesthetic cruised and dentistry in
the in the office. Yeah, and the users a little
tiny noodles thing. So Colorado, Illinois they soon follow suit.
They update their narcotics laws. This is primarily in response,
once again to abuse by doctors and pharmacists. Eighteen ninety three,
the state of New York first big state to do it.
They ban the use of cocaine without a doctor's note,
again to limit recreational cocaine abuse. Same thing doctor's pharmacist.

(43:22):
One month after cocaine had first rived in US, a
Connecticut doctor he'd created a new product. I remember you
were talking about they didn't know how to get cocaine
into the body the best way. So he decides, oh,
I mean, once again for medical purposes, He's going to
create some way to fight the common cold with cocaine.
So he grinds up menthol and cocaine and some milk
sugar and he sells this as a medical snuff.

Speaker 5 (43:42):
Right.

Speaker 2 (43:42):
It's just you can do the white powder and you
can just snort it. So he thought it would open
up the nostrils. What it did was create a quick
and easy way to recreationally do cocaine. Young folks love it.
They start calling it sniff and cocaine.

Speaker 5 (43:53):
There.

Speaker 2 (43:53):
You got to get that sniff and cocaine. It becomes
the new drug ad choice. Soon enough, there's news headlines
documenting this new moral panic. This headline's like boy slave
to cocaine or that was from the Chicago Tribune eighteen
ninety six.

Speaker 3 (44:05):
This general mood, all these stories milk powdery you said,
milk sugar, milk sugar. Yeah, still it's interesting.

Speaker 2 (44:10):
Yeah, does that make it sweet, not too sweet? Who'd
be really crystal? And it's kind of a flaky, dry sugar.

Speaker 3 (44:14):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (44:15):
Anyway, they're basically the stories. The moral panic is that
cocaine is fueling the white slave trade. That's what they think.
The white slave trade is being run on cocaine. That's
what this is the new story, say Elizabeth, All these
like white girls and boys are going into the big.

Speaker 3 (44:29):
City and Jimmy and.

Speaker 2 (44:30):
Then yeah, they're being like suckered into warehouses by people
with like cocaine. I don't know. These are the stories.
It becomes this consistent theme, right for two decades. In
nineteen twelve, the New York Tribune ran the headline Cocaine
an ally of the white slavers. It just they just
keep doing the same stories over and over again. Right
despite all these screaming headlines about lost white youth. Yea,
the moral panic never takes hold of people's imaginations and

(44:53):
nothing's really happening. The story starts to shift. In eighteen
ninety eight, a Chicago paper wrote a story about a
cocaine club where black people gathered in secret and they
blew rails of this new hip drug. And the paper
wrote and I quote yesterday, the following invitations were sent
to a number of prospective members. You are cordially invited
to attend a coke party given by the Colored Cocaine
Club at its hall on December twenty third at three pm.

(45:14):
There was a large attendance. An Ramsey, a depraved negress
who was known as the Queen of the Cocaine Fiends,
sniffed the drug up her nostrils until her nose was
swollen and split open. She is the ruling spirit of
these gatherings. So in these news stories right, setting aside
the casual racism, coke was shown as the ruiner of people. Right,
fears of black people doing coke were largely non existent

(45:35):
and mostly focused on the cocaine, not the black people.
But then as the century turned Elizabeth, cocaine sniffing became
the drug a choice for working men, in particular black
waterfront dock workers and Steve Adoors. They helped spread the
drug across the South, first up and down the Mississippi,
and we see all these states start banning cocaine all
along the Mississippi River. It makes its way into New
Orleans and the Forum from there to the former plantation workers.

(45:58):
Now it starts showing up in what would be the
the predecessors of juke joints. People are doing it on
the weekend.

Speaker 7 (46:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (46:02):
The white planters are stoked about cocaine because the black
field workers worked longer and they were more productive, so
they were like, yeah, the white planters started growing cocaine
giving it out to the field hands. It was like
coffee in a breakway. We're oh, yeah, there's just handed
cocaine out right. The popularity cocaine spreads across the South right,
especially in New Orleans because it's a party city. This
would soon lead to a new wave of racialized fears

(46:23):
of negroes running them up high on cocaine. The typical
Southern fears of black people getting their bloody vengeance on
white folks start creeping north with these news stories. Right
the Atlanta Journal Constitution, my hometown paper, they published a
story a nineteen hundred two negro women engage in a
bloody fight and cocaine dive. Another AJC headline from the
same time, frightful spread of habit among the Negroes. My

(46:45):
favorite is from November twenty eighth to nineteen hundred Senators
visit cocaine sniffers. I don't know what the story is
there now, there wasn't Atlanta copy. They quoted in the
Ajac and the cocaine says, cocaine makes the Negroes quiet
and inoffensive. And if we have less trouble, cocaine victims
in with whiskey victims. So they're like all about it.
The cops are saying, we're cool with it, doesn't matter.
New York papers they start running similar stories as the

(47:07):
southern headlines started getting syndicated all across the country. This
wave builds over the decade. In nineteen oh five, the
New York Times publishes a story, Negro Cocaine evil. That's
all it is, just three words, Negro cocaine evil. No story,
that's just said. It was about cocaine the Southern States.
So all these Northerners are worried about what's happening down
to our brothers in the South. I guess I don't
know right. So later on nineteen twelve, the New York

(47:30):
Times story there's another one. This one's about the local habits.
It says Cuban Negroes introduced a cocaine vice in New
York Merk introduced the cocaine price in New York anyway,
This just general ambient racist trend eventually culminated in a
corker of a New York Times magazine story published February
nineteen fourteen, with the very unsubtle headline Negro cocaine fiends

(47:50):
are a new Southern menace. That published story which was incorrect.
Mind you detailed accounts of coke mad negroes, and the
article is written by one doctor Edward Huntington will You,
who was a local moral skold. He featured lines in
his article like nine men killed in Mississippi by craz's
cocaine takers, five in North Carolina, three in Tennessee. These
are the facts that need no imaginative coloring. Why do

(48:11):
they need no imaginative coloring, Elizabeth, because of racism. The
reader's already been primed to imagine the black men committing
the crimes.

Speaker 3 (48:18):
Did they really happen?

Speaker 7 (48:19):
No.

Speaker 2 (48:19):
The purported news story included a tale of a cocaine
stiffing negro who was in vulnerable to the effects of guns.
Bullets bounced off his coke addled body. A direct gunshot
to the heart, Elizabeth, a direct gunshot to the heart.
In the story is quote did not even stagger the man.
The new story reported how this incident and one's like it,
had spurred Southern cops to purchase quote guns of greater

(48:40):
shocking power. So they wanted stoppers because he got these,
you know, bulletproof negroes running own cocaine. The real story,
by the way, Elizabeth, since you did ask, had been
published by The New York Times one year earlier, in
nineteen thirteen. In the original reporting, it was two brothers,
not one bulletproof negro cocine. The brothers did act violently,

(49:00):
and in response, three innocent black men were killed by
a white mob as retribution. But what do facts matter
when you got a good racialized scare campaign.

Speaker 3 (49:08):
To build dude who like trash his own house during
all the George Floyd of rising and then wrote Black's
rule in the driveway.

Speaker 2 (49:18):
So we have there's there's there's our crime. All right,
we got I got a one percent. Somebody did get hurt, right,
I felt that one percent was important to include. But
so that same year, as that crazy racist New York
Times story runs, it finally grips the America followed nineteen
fourteen folks down to Washington. They act on this imagined threat.
Lawmakers passed new legislation, federal legislation, the Harrison Act. After that,

(49:38):
it makes cocaine illegal without a prescription across the United States. Yeah,
that coke usage drops off, then the hip they move
on to heroin. We got new drugs.

Speaker 4 (49:46):
Right.

Speaker 2 (49:46):
Cocaine becomes a crime when black people were doing the
same arical drug as freud. So there's there's our ridiculous
crime when folks with field sweat on their backs enjoyed
the preferred pastime of popes and a queen and Sherlock Holmes.
Once it did, the melanated folks started snow from cocaine
and private clubs of colored cocaine enthusiasts. Yeah, that, Elizabeth
is when cocaine became a drug menace. But you know what,
good and honestly, in my opinion, cocaine is a menace.

(50:08):
It should be a regulated substance. It's it's too much
for the human animal. I mean, look at everybody's reaction
to it, like this is amazing. It's not a powder
meant for It's a powderman for gods, not mere mortals.
That's my thought. I think the South Americans were right.
We're like, this is some god stuff, right man. I
know I'm kind of making it sound good. I don't
mean to. It's not. Coca is terrible, and you know what,
I want coke to be illegal. But anyway that is
out coke and our history with it became illegal ridiculous

(50:32):
and ridiculous. So that's a ridiculous takeaway, Elizabeth.

Speaker 3 (50:35):
Don't do drugs, don't do coke. Yes, that's my big takeaway.
And also, like the people people all coked out don't
know how obnoxious they are. In their minds. They're thinking
they're just like the funniest, like quickest, cutest thing, and
oh my goodness.

Speaker 2 (50:51):
Yes, I would love you be able to show them
the difference.

Speaker 3 (50:53):
So yeah, all teeth grinding now for.

Speaker 2 (50:57):
Me once again, thank you for asking.

Speaker 3 (50:58):
A little Yeah, yeah, I want to know.

Speaker 2 (51:00):
My ridiculous takeaway is is well, I thought of like
the Chinese folks in the West, they could have been like,
we could have told you how this would play out,
because one generation earlier they had dealt with this with
the opium line. Yeah, and that was because of the
people in the West wanted to lessen the power of
fast growing Chinese wealth. So they're like, oh, it's come
off with this. We'll legalize all of them. We'll make
it a problem. We could be suspicious of anyone with money. Yeah, anyway,

(51:23):
that was a generation earlier. So really there's truly nothing
new under the sun. Not a lick anyway. That's all
I got for you, but the history of cocaine and
why we have talk therapy US. You can online a
Ridiculous Crime on Twitter, Instagram. We have a website ridiculous
Crime dot com, and we also like your talkbacks emails
if you want at Ridiculous Crime at gmail dot com.
Thanks for listening. We'll catch your next crime. Ridiculous Crime

(51:50):
is supposed to by Elizabeth Dutton and Zaron Burnette, produced
and edited by our resident cocaine hippo caretaker Dave Cousten.
Research is by Mursa, I Don't Dance with that, Blow
Brown and Andre Yeah. Anime is my cocaine song, Sharpened Tear.
Our theme song is by Thomas Keep It Natural Lee
and Travis I prefer Pepsi Dunton. The host wardrobe provided

(52:10):
by Botany five hundred. Executive producers are Ben Did you
know that Keith Richards once started a line of his
own father's ashes bowling and Noel, Yeah, I did you
told me that brown?

Speaker 4 (52:25):
Okay, So I just had to try the Snoop cereal.
So I went to Walmart and I bought it. It
was one ninety eight. I got the frosted drizzlers.

Speaker 7 (52:38):
And I'm going to try them. These are really good.

Speaker 4 (52:52):
These were really good, so continuing from the last one,
they're really not really really sweet. I think they're just
a little bit sweeter than the frosted miniwheeds. They're a
lot cheaper too. I think they're really delicious. They're really good.

(53:18):
I can't stop eating them. Definitely try them out.

Speaker 6 (53:22):
Ridicous Crime, Say it one more Timeous Crime.

Speaker 1 (53:29):
Ridiculous Crime is a production of iHeartRadio four more podcasts.
My heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.