NCJ Number
184660
Date Published
1999
Length
23 pages
Annotation
This chapter investigates the roles of doctors, diplomats and businessmen in the transformation of cocaine from miracle to menace between 1860 and 1950.
Abstract
In the 19th century, doctors were among the first to hail cocaine as a great discovery, but they also contributed to the definition of addiction as a disease. Moreover, they rejected the use of cocaine outside the medical realm. This change in attitudes toward cocaine in the medical world must be seen as the underlying implicit cause for the national and international restriction of production, trade, and use during the first decades of the 20th century. The increasing popularity of coca and cocaine gave Dutch businessmen the idea of planting coca in the colony of the Dutch East Indies and of exporting its leaf to the West. This was a brilliant success by the beginning of the 20th century as the Netherlands became the largest producer of coca and cocaine in the world. That situation ended in the 1920's as a result of the implementation of international treaties and national laws. Dutch diplomats tried to protect their economic interests by arguing that limits on the legal trade and production of cocaine would spur illegal trade that would be almost impossible to control. This proved to be a prophetic insight. By the beginning of the 1930's, the illegal drug trade in Europe took off and the battle against drugs was declared. Figure, primary sources, notes