We Need to Talk About Cocaine (Again)
from Witty Historian Hosted by Witty Historian
This video covers the history of cocaine as a legal medicine in the United States, including cocaine toothache drops sold to children in the 1880s and the chain of events that turned a medically endorsed substance into a criminalized drug.In the late nineteenth century, cocaine was not a vice.. it was a prescription. Doctors recommended it, the U.S. Surgeon General endorsed it, Pope Leo XIII carried a flask of cocaine wine under his cassock, and a pharmacist in Albany, New York sold cocaine toothache drops to parents for fifteen cents with an advertisement showing two children playing in a yard. This video traces the full arc of that era: how cocaine moved from a German chemistry lab to every pharmacy shelf in America, who was destroyed by it while still believing in it, how the law that finally removed it from those shelves was passed using fabricated racial terror, and what it left behind in medicine that is still in use today.A calm, atmospheric narration style makes this ideal for long, uninterrupted listening sessions. Many listeners use these stories to relax, unwind, or fall asleep naturally.
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