Cocaine Nights

Competing only with alcohol and marijuana, cocaine is one of the most popular substances abused in the western world. In addition to cocaine, is also surrounded by a halo of glory and wealth, increasing its popularity as the drug of movable up. Although this image of the user of cocaine may have peaked in the yuppie "and" me "generation of the 1980s and 90s, this has accompanied the drug for most of its historical relations with the West.

Pope Leo XIII, who allegedly carried a flask of wine Mariani, the wine popular in 1860 cocaine laced with him wherever he went, to Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional super-detective who regularly injected himself with cocaine. Doyle praised the character of drugs to his assistant Watson, Ph.D., declaring to cocaine, "so transcendentally stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a matter of little moment." And everyone is familiar with the popular drink, Coca Cola, which included a "pinch" of coca leaf in its original recipe up to 1906 (after 1906, the company used decocainized leaves), where the purity of food and drugs was passed by Congress. Even the famous story, "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", is known to have been written by Robert Louis Stephenson when he was in a frenzy of cocaine six days.

Only briefly, during the panic "moral" of the early twentieth century has been the abuse of controlled drug in the bohemian, players, high-and low-class prostitutes, night porters, the bell boys, burglars, drug traffickers, pimps, and casual laborers, "the 1903 American Journal of Pharmacy. Well, while it's abuse has been derided, he remained popular as a stimulant and a cure for the "enlightened" population. Even as late as 1938, the Larousse Gastronomique was published carrying a recipe for cocaine pudding ".

popularity of cocaine have risen again in the sixties and culture disco eighties with popular culture has been said that the drug of the rich and famous, the yuppie and student of the college. Cocaine was represented positively, or at least exciting in many films, including "St. Elmo's Fire", where its use is presented as normal casual consumption of alcohol. Cocaine co-starred in the music industry also, with such popular hits as Eric Clapton song, cocaine, "and" Cocaine Decisions, "by Frank Zappa.

As mentioned at the beginning of the twentieth century, society began to recognize the destructive and addictive nature of cocaine. While the Pure Food and Drugs Act 1906 was introduced to require labeling of all products of cocaine, it was not made illegal until the 1914 law on narcotics Harrison, prohibits any use of nonprescription products for cocaine. This law also mislabeled cocaine a narcotic, which misclassification continued throughout the popular culture (cocaine is a stimulant).

Although technically outlawing all distribution and consumption of cocaine, it was still legal for registered companies and individuals. Cocaine did not become a controlled substance until 1970 when the United States, he listed in the Controlled Substances Act. Up to this point, the application has been weak and its use is relatively open and rarely prosecuted in the United States. Yet, even this classification has not prevented its use and eighties saw a dramatic increase its use by American teenagers.

Around the same time, a new development, the introduction of "crack" in society, it is more accessible to low-income neighborhoods, causing his popularity to deteriorate in the late twentieth century prt. "Crack" is a concentrated cooked, "free-base", a highly addictive and very powerful form of the drug cocaine. The name comes from the crackling sound of the water evaporation as the solution of cocaine is cooked.

Currently, global consumption of cocaine is about 600 met.