Cocaine has a very fascinating history which dates back to the 16th century when a Catholic artist Don Diego De Robles declared that "coca is a plant that the devil invented for the total destruction of the natives." It did not begin on the streets of South Florida upon the safe arrival of many ship loads from Colombia. Its psycho stimulating properties were not suddenly discovered when the drug lords placed a few "keys" here and there in various communities all over this country. Cocaine has been around for a very long time and once held a place of royalty during pre-Columbian times. Sigmund Freud wrote a song of praise in its honor and did some self-experimentation with its use. Robert Louis Stephenson wrote the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde while he enjoyed a six day cocaine binge. It is said that Shakespeare might have even smoked and inhaled. Cocaine is both famous and infamous and has in the last twenty to thirty years been more of the latter. What it has done to America and Americans is mind boggling in terms of the degradation and eroding values in American society. It has waged its own chemical warfare from within, without respect for race or national origin, wealth or poverty, christians or protestants. Cocaine is a nondiscriminatory drug which causes mass destruction economically, socially, physically and psychologically.
             Erythroxyline is the chemical name given to the active ingredient of the coca plant first isolated in the West by the German chemist Friedrich Gaedcke in 1855. The leaves of the South American shrub Erythroxylon coca produces an alkaloid that was named "cocaine" by Albert Niemann when he described an improved purification process for his Ph.D.. As a psycho stimulant, cocaine induces a sense of exhilaration. The process is made possible by the blocking of the reuptake of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that is in the mid brain. It was once called "the elixir of ...