Speaker 1: Ridiculous Crime is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Elizabeth Dunton Saron Brunette got a question for you, my friend, Yes, ma'am,
Speaker 2: do you know what's ridiculous?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 4: I do.
Speaker 2: Okay, Well I'm sitting over here, just honestly.
Speaker 3: I will let you know. Okay, So I like jokesters, tricksters.
Speaker 3: The ultimate trickster is what one art historian called this artist,
Speaker 3: Jen's Haunting. And he's from He lives in Copenhagen. All right,
Speaker 3: he's a conceptual artist. He does like big sculptures. And
Speaker 3: he had this one I head a thing about like
Speaker 3: a sound piece where Turks told jokes in their native
Speaker 3: language and then they played it in a public square
Speaker 3: in Oslo. Okay, yeah, okay, you see where I'm going
Speaker 3: with this anyway, this is not a mashup.
Speaker 2: Ps God, yeah, Bert I can cry if I want to.
Speaker 3: We we did actually get a lot of tips off
Speaker 3: on this, but it's a good art kind of mini heist.
Speaker 3: Where so this this haunting, he'd done a piece before
Speaker 3: that had currency on it, money, and so a museum
Speaker 3: gave him money to create two works with banknotes featured
Speaker 3: all over these canvases. It was supposed to have four
Speaker 3: hundred and ninety two five hundred and forty nine kroner,
Speaker 3: which is equivalent to little, you know, sixty nine thousand
Speaker 3: ballparking dollars, which is the average annual salary in Denmark.
Speaker 3: And he was supposed to put it on this canvas
Speaker 3: and oh my gosh, what a statement, and look at
Speaker 3: this is what we make. So he goes. He goes though,
Speaker 3: he's like, yeah, hold on, let me just work on this.
Speaker 4: I love that.
Speaker 2: Let me work with this, right, and he.
Speaker 3: Drives up in his little scooter whatever, scoot scoot. He
Speaker 3: toodles up and walks in with two blank canvases and
Speaker 3: is like, here are my pieces. And he said, they
Speaker 3: said what and he said yeah, they're called take the
Speaker 3: money and run. Oh yes, I heard of the just
Speaker 3: gave him blank ones.
Speaker 2: I love this. He's like, I spent the money. Yeah, right,
Speaker 2: there you go art.
Speaker 3: So that the museum was like, not funny, seriously, where's
Speaker 3: the art. He's like, not funny, this is art.
Speaker 2: This is it. And so U say, Marcel, do this
Speaker 2: is it?
Speaker 3: They said, we're supposed to turn back, like we're supposed
Speaker 3: to get this money back, like we're going to be
Speaker 3: able to take it off the canvases when.
Speaker 2: This I didn't see that in the paperwork.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So they took him to court and the court
Speaker 3: said that he could keep forty thousand of those kroner
Speaker 3: because that was what they were supposed to pay him.
Speaker 3: But he had to give everything back and he's now
Speaker 3: appealing it because he's like it is but art.
Speaker 2: Who's to say it was conceptual art?
Speaker 3: Yeah? That was my concept is I took your money
Speaker 3: and a ran and that, my friend, is ridiculous.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, that's super ridiculous. That is thank you
Speaker 2: laid one.
Speaker 5: Up for me.
Speaker 2: Well, if you got a second, I got one for you. Yes,
Speaker 2: this story, it is wild. Are you ready to have
Speaker 2: your mind the flippid all the time? Yeah, because this
Speaker 2: is a story of how and why cocaine became the thing.
Speaker 2: What Yeah, it's with this story, okay, elzb that comes
Speaker 2: down to three iconic names, two brands, and a man. Okay, yeah.
Speaker 2: Now what's when I was doing the research on this,
Speaker 2: Well was truly wild is how these three and their
Speaker 2: relationships to cocaine it changed not just recreational drug use forever,
Speaker 2: but also how you and I and we mister and
Speaker 2: Missus America and all the ships to see how we
Speaker 2: think about ourselves and others? Oh yeah, did you know
Speaker 2: that we can blame cocaine for the rise of Freudian
Speaker 2: analysis and talk therapy? What?
Speaker 6: Okay?
Speaker 2: This is Ridiculous Crime, a podcast about absurd and outrageous capers, heists,
Speaker 2: and cons. It's always ninety nine percent murder free and
Speaker 2: one hundred percent ridiculous.
Speaker 3: You are correct, Elizabeth Zaren, all.
Speaker 2: Right, for reasons that make perfect sense. When we've discussed
Speaker 2: cocaine comes up a lot in the show.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I guess.
Speaker 2: It's often of a ridiculous crime is because it inspires
Speaker 2: ridiculous egos.
Speaker 3: It's just fuels ridiculous crimes. It's a subject as a
Speaker 3: target of crimes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's both a motivator and the target. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 2: So why did we start sniffing that demon white pattern.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna tell you. They simply put the reason why
Speaker 2: people do coke recreationally. It comes down to three names
Speaker 2: that you know, you already know these folks, Sigmund Freud,
Speaker 2: Coca Cola, and Sherlock Holms. Charlotte Okay said, like I said,
Speaker 2: two brands and a man.
Speaker 3: Okay, let's start with a brand, a man, and a
Speaker 3: fictional man.
Speaker 2: Sure, but Charlotte Colmes at this point is a brand. Okay,
Speaker 2: I'm stretching it.
Speaker 3: Well, then two brands and okay this, No, I.
Speaker 2: Got it, a brand, a man and a fictional man.
Speaker 3: Okay, I like it better.
Speaker 2: Okay, I'll start with the first one. Up coke as
Speaker 2: in Coca cola. Let's separate the fact from the fiction,
Speaker 2: legend from the myth and uh also the coke from
Speaker 2: the Kuba lever Now, Elizabeth, you ever heard of the
Speaker 2: drink von Matriani?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 2: You ever heard of Queen Victoria? Not the cruise ship
Speaker 2: the woman?
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, we go way back.
Speaker 2: What about Thomas Edison?
Speaker 3: I know of him?
Speaker 2: Ulysses S. Grant, Yes, you like to read? Yes, you
Speaker 2: like the playwright Heinri Gibson. Yes, what about Jules Verne?
Speaker 3: Yes?
Speaker 2: Okay, you're also a former Catholic. So you ever heard
Speaker 2: of Pope Leo the thirteenth?
Speaker 3: Yes?
Speaker 2: Can you guess what all of these folks have.
Speaker 3: Little sniffers?
Speaker 2: No, they all publicly exclaimed the virtues of drinking red
Speaker 2: wine laced with cocaine. Oh god, yeah, the Holy Roman Father,
Speaker 2: Pope Leo the thirteenth. He was a particularly big fan.
Speaker 2: He said that Juan Marianni, the brand name for Cocaine
Speaker 2: red wine, was perfect for those times when quote, when
Speaker 2: prayer was insufficient.
Speaker 3: Wait, okay, stop, okay, So he just still sprinkle me,
Speaker 3: sprinkle me into the red wine.
Speaker 2: And he's like, Jesus makes better wine.
Speaker 3: Is like this, this is I can do anything now.
Speaker 2: Yeah exactly.
Speaker 3: He's like, this is a nightmare.
Speaker 2: So what about old Tommy Edison. He was also a
Speaker 2: big fan of cocaine wine. He was like, look, the
Speaker 2: electric lightbel ain't gonna invent itself. Daddy needs his cocaine wine.
Speaker 3: Cocaine I'm not. I'm not familiar with cocaine wine.
Speaker 7: I know.
Speaker 3: Again, that's terrifying.
Speaker 2: Also another big fan former Civil War General US President
Speaker 2: Ulysses As Grant. He was a vall merryani man as well.
Speaker 2: Grant known to be a drinker. He at the end
Speaker 2: of his life when he's writing his memoirs, he tasted
Speaker 2: some of this cocaine lace wine. He's like, we're gonna
Speaker 2: get a barrel of this stuff.
Speaker 3: And it was always red wine. Doesn't you think it
Speaker 3: would make sense to put it in white wine.
Speaker 2: Uh, if you were right, Yeah, if you're dumping like
Speaker 2: just straight powdered.
Speaker 3: And also just the vibe of a buttery shard.
Speaker 2: Yeah, smooth buttery shard. So you have all these incredible endorsements, right,
Speaker 2: You got luminaries, queens, popes, writers, actresses like Sarah Barnhardt,
Speaker 2: the big actress of the nineteenth century. Ers, you know,
Speaker 2: war heroes. Everybody is saying, you gotta dry this cocaine wine.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 2: It becomes a publicity gold mine. And it also launched
Speaker 2: a cocaine craze.
Speaker 3: It was like the four Loco of the day exactly.
Speaker 2: This was the first cocaine craze. It starts out based
Speaker 2: on this one humble, little scientific journal paper. Right. So
Speaker 2: back in eighteen fifty nine, there was this chemist, Friedrich Wohler,
Speaker 2: and he isolated the active ingredient in the coca leaf. Now,
Speaker 2: that same year, an Italian scientist Paolo Mantegayza, he wrote
Speaker 2: a paper about this strange South American plant called cocaine.
Speaker 2: It's isolate cocaine. He was astounded with the potential for medicines.
Speaker 2: He's like, oh, you can do everything with this stuff.
Speaker 2: It's amazing. Right, French chemist. He reads this Italian scientist
Speaker 2: paper about the coca plant and all of his medicinal
Speaker 2: properties gives him ideas. He thinks to himself, what if
Speaker 2: what if I were to pour some of this coca
Speaker 2: into my wine? Huh so, and that Elizabeth was the
Speaker 2: invention of the French dish coca van No, no, it's
Speaker 2: chicken heay? Whatever is is with his idea? What if
Speaker 2: it dumps of this cocain too? My revant? He was
Speaker 2: like that became the brainchild of the French chemist Angelo Marianni.
Speaker 2: So for his new beverage, he selected a fine Bordeaux wine,
Speaker 2: a smart red with an earthy nose, and he laced
Speaker 2: it with six milligrams of coca leaf per ounce of wine.
Speaker 2: Oh yes, per ounce?
Speaker 6: What?
Speaker 2: And thus von Marianni.
Speaker 3: Was after himself. He's like, I can't feel my faith exactly, I.
Speaker 2: Can't even is he is my tief? So it was
Speaker 2: called technically, the official name was von Tolnique Marianni a
Speaker 2: lacuca du perout okay right, So it was sold as
Speaker 2: the DJ stif and appartif it was built as an
Speaker 2: energy boosting tonic. It's just everything to anybody. Cocaine wines
Speaker 2: were even sold as safe for French kids. Now do
Speaker 2: you understand French kids were already drinking wine, So it's
Speaker 2: just a cocaine that was new. So anyway, the year
Speaker 2: at this point, we're in eighteen sixty three when he
Speaker 2: invents his cocaine wine. So this new drink, which I said,
Speaker 2: it's heavily marketed right around the world. Vall Marianni becomes
Speaker 2: this huge hit. You've seen posters of von Marianni, big
Speaker 2: now poke styled things. Yeah, most likely embtting you've seen
Speaker 2: what Now the Queen of the British Empire, the head
Speaker 2: of the Catholic Church, they're both saying coke wine is it?
Speaker 2: So what do the people do? Everyone's like, oh, this
Speaker 2: is amazing. Then medicine comes along. There's this wave of doctors.
Speaker 2: They start singing the praise of cocaine wine. In the
Speaker 2: journal Medical News. This was from eighteen ninety it reported
Speaker 2: quote that no recognized medical preparation has received stronger endorsement
Speaker 2: at the hands of the medical profession. So eventually America
Speaker 2: gets his grubby little hands on medical cocaine and coke wine,
Speaker 2: and you know, then we start doing we do best.
Speaker 2: We turned it into big business. Yeah, so what it
Speaker 2: first started out is snake oil, Like you know, the
Speaker 2: base side. We talked about the ancient Chinese medicines in
Speaker 2: the West. Eventually these turn into patent medicines, and these
Speaker 2: patent medicine ingredients were later replaced with cocaine because they're like,
Speaker 2: why do we got to put it in whiskey and
Speaker 2: a bunch of sugar. We just put it into cocaine.
Speaker 2: So then all of a sudden, boom, almost all the
Speaker 2: patent medicines are cocaine and morphine are laudanum based.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: Eventually this blossoms into a whole industry of health tonics
Speaker 2: and vitality restoring elixirs and all that kind of stuff. Right,
Speaker 2: many of these, as I said, if you drew huge
Speaker 2: doses of cocaine, and so much so that when von
Speaker 2: Marianni wanted to import his cocaine wine, he had to
Speaker 2: up the amount of cocaine he put his wine. Yes, exactly.
Speaker 2: So the thing about how Von Marianni was like how
Speaker 2: why it was such a kick to the spirit, if
Speaker 2: you will, was the cocaine would be metabolized by the wine. Okay,
Speaker 2: you're ready for little chemistry.
Speaker 3: Elizabeth always sciences and me, oh my god, love each other.
Speaker 2: Two fingers in one glove.
Speaker 3: I mean, I have not met a science class. I
Speaker 3: couldn't fail.
Speaker 2: So the active ingredient in red wine is ethanol. That's
Speaker 2: a type of alcohol, right, So ethanol can also be
Speaker 2: used as a solvent. So this solvent then can extract
Speaker 2: what we think of as cocaine from the coca leaf, right,
Speaker 2: and then it kind of will suspend the cocaine in
Speaker 2: the red wine. So what that means is that when
Speaker 2: you drink the von Marianni, the coca leaf and the
Speaker 2: red wine, they create this new third chemical compound called
Speaker 2: coca ethylene. This is informed in the liver as you
Speaker 2: metabolize the coke wine. And this is what gave vall
Speaker 2: Mariani it's powerful kick, this cocaine coc ethylene. It gives
Speaker 2: also crazy euphoria inducing qualities. It's like cocaine and wine
Speaker 2: formed a wonder twins like situation. Right. So unfortunately, and
Speaker 2: I don't know sadly of who you say, if you
Speaker 2: were a fan of vall Marianni, the inventor Angelo Marianni,
Speaker 2: he made one big mistake. He forgot to pass on
Speaker 2: his recipe to his descendants. So his coke wine fell
Speaker 2: out of production as soon as he drops test his
Speaker 2: secret of the cocaine wine went to his grave with him.
Speaker 2: I do not know if he died of a heart attack.
Speaker 2: Pro I have to I have to consort with my sources,
Speaker 2: but I can't tell you right now. Interesting anyway, his
Speaker 2: creation right it inspires the Americans. As I told you,
Speaker 2: one American in particular, You're gonna turn this into a
Speaker 2: great empire, a cocaine wine health tonic. This American, he
Speaker 2: was a morphine junkie, a former Civil War veteran on
Speaker 2: the losing side. His name John Pemberton. He creates Pemberton's
Speaker 2: French Wine right now. The year at this point, we're
Speaker 2: into eighteen eighty five. Now, Angela Marianne's I told you
Speaker 2: the original formula for cocoa wine, he'd featured six milligrams
Speaker 2: of cocaine per fluid ounce. But when you wanted to
Speaker 2: costell to the Americans, he had to bump it up
Speaker 2: to seven point two milligams per rounce. So Pemberton's just
Speaker 2: like he's clocking right those same types of numbers.
Speaker 3: I'll see you and raise you to nine.
Speaker 2: He's like, that's not enough. I need a little some
Speaker 2: extra to give a little more kick, a little more
Speaker 2: pep in your steps. So he drops in colon nuts.
Speaker 2: That's his big secret, So heavy cocaine and caffeine and
Speaker 2: it's just euphoria. So he's now got a supercharged cocaine wine,
Speaker 2: extra caffeine. He calls Pemberton's French Wine instant hit. Now.
Speaker 2: A year later, the Atlanta town fathers a passed legislation
Speaker 2: to make Atlanta Fulton County go dry the whole areas.
Speaker 2: No liquor is being sold. So it's one of the
Speaker 2: first prohibition laws. The South was way ahead of the
Speaker 2: nation on this. No old Pemberton he has to immediately
Speaker 2: eighty six the wine from his new drink. So what
Speaker 2: does he do? He does it. He just says, I
Speaker 2: got to hit on my hands. I I gotta like,
Speaker 2: what am I gonna do? What I'm gonna do? He goes, ah,
Speaker 2: I got it. I'll make a carbonated tonic. So he
Speaker 2: makes this carbonated version of his cocaine wine and he
Speaker 2: calls it coca cola.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 2: So that's the coca for the cocaine and the cola
Speaker 2: for the cocaine wine part was now gone, and so
Speaker 2: next comes new legislation, federal laws. Nineteen oh six, the
Speaker 2: US Congress passes the Pure Food and Drug Act. Right,
Speaker 2: This was because of all the patent medicines. People were
Speaker 2: dropping dead from going blind, the limbs were falling off.
Speaker 2: They're like, we gotta come up with a loss. That
Speaker 2: they come up with basically the USDA's initial There's also
Speaker 2: other factors. We'll talk about this later. Anyway, this was
Speaker 2: basically a response to primarily muckraking journalists of the day.
Speaker 2: They did all his work to expose the unsanitary conditions
Speaker 2: and like the factory meat production places like the Chicago
Speaker 2: meat factories think Upton singing players the jungle. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 2: So that book was published in nineteen oh six. This
Speaker 2: becomes huge trouble for Coca Cola when they now passed
Speaker 2: laws in nineteen oh six for this Pure Food and
Speaker 2: Drug Act. Because people are so horrified by this book,
Speaker 2: they're like, we need new laws. Coca Cola's like, damn it,
Speaker 2: our cocaine. Right, So then an even worse blow comes
Speaker 2: in nineteen fourteen, cocaine has made fully illegal in the US.
Speaker 2: So they're like, what are we going to do now?
Speaker 2: Our whole product line is based on this. You can't
Speaker 2: buy it without a doctor's prescription. We can't get all
Speaker 2: of our customers doctor's prescriptions. Yeah, what are we going
Speaker 2: to do? So they're like, well, we'll have to get
Speaker 2: a doctor's note for the company. So this point, Coca
Speaker 2: Cola had been enduring a decades long fight to secure
Speaker 2: its supply of coca leaves. It was ready to fight
Speaker 2: for its coca leaves. So they've been primarily importing them
Speaker 2: from Peru, but they had been also experiencing all sorts
Speaker 2: of crazy ideas. At one point, they decided they would
Speaker 2: try to grow their own coca. So they went and
Speaker 2: they bought up this land and they created these secret
Speaker 2: coca farms in Hawaii.
Speaker 3: Oh really Yeah, But.
Speaker 2: They found that they were much better being a drinkmaker
Speaker 2: than a coca farmer. So they're like, mix that right.
Speaker 2: So then the cocaine prohibition said, say, and I tell
Speaker 2: you cocaine, where's Coca Cola gonna get their So they
Speaker 2: sound a new way to secure their coca supplier. They
Speaker 2: sought out a new business partner, the US government at
Speaker 2: the time. The President of Coca Cola was a man
Speaker 2: named Asa Candler. He's also the first to change coke
Speaker 2: secret formula. He took out the cocaine. He's the guy, right,
Speaker 2: So in his place, he came up with decoconized coca leaves.
Speaker 2: So yeah, the active part of the cocaine was taken out,
Speaker 2: leaving only the flavor of the coca leaf. So he
Speaker 2: works with legislators in Washington and aisen Kandler. He made
Speaker 2: sure Coca Cola was exempted from any current prohibitions, any
Speaker 2: future prohibitions, and Coca Cola's lobbying efforts payoff. New laws
Speaker 2: are drafted, Coca Cola is exempted. There's a provise on
Speaker 2: the law that allows the drink maker to use quote
Speaker 2: decoconized coca leaves or preparations made therefrom or to any
Speaker 2: other preparations of coca leaves that do not contain cocaine. So,
Speaker 2: to this day, Coca Cola has the same supplier of
Speaker 2: its decoconized coca leaves, Maywood Chemical Works in Maywood, New Jersey,
Speaker 2: one of two companies that was grandfathered in under this law.
Speaker 2: Still the taste of the coca coca, but just no cocaine,
Speaker 2: No active ingredient to get you hot.
Speaker 3: And so that's part of that like secret recipe.
Speaker 2: Part of the secret recipe.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So this chump from the company may Would Chemicals. This
Speaker 2: is they're located like ten miles from Manhattan. They're not
Speaker 2: like I mean, they're in New Jersey. It's part of
Speaker 2: like that New Jersey chemicy the corridor that I always
Speaker 2: make fun of. But anyway, the company, it continues to
Speaker 2: stay to legally import and process copious amounts of cocaine
Speaker 2: and it's all sitting there in New Jersey in the Atlantic.
Speaker 2: In two thousand and three, they reported on this Maywood
Speaker 2: Chemical works. Uh huh at the time in two thousand
Speaker 2: and three, they imported three hundred and eighty five thousand
Speaker 2: pounds of coca leaf and.
Speaker 3: The cocaine they take out. What do they do with that?
Speaker 2: That would have been if they would have turned into cocaine,
Speaker 2: that was about two hundred million dollars worth of cocaine.
Speaker 3: That's what. So what do they do? Just flush it
Speaker 3: down the twill?
Speaker 2: They incinerate it. Apparently, that's that's the story.
Speaker 3: So like the local Nerdwelt climbs.
Speaker 2: I think they do it and like pressurize anyway. I
Speaker 2: do not have an answer for how they get rid
Speaker 2: of the cocaine that they isolate.
Speaker 3: That's yeah.
Speaker 2: But answer to your question of can you even taste
Speaker 2: the cocaine Coca Cola, they say it's perceptible. They say
Speaker 2: that it's very actually important flavor. And then when you
Speaker 2: take it out, people are like this.
Speaker 3: This is what is it tastes like? Isolated?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm curious what wine cocaine tastes likes. That's your
Speaker 2: cocaine wine. That's personally Yeah, that was the first cocaine crase.
Speaker 2: Coca Cola popularized it, and so did Von Marianni. Now
Speaker 2: let's peel back the curtain for the next big name
Speaker 2: in cocaine segment, Freud. But first, well they can break Elizabeth.
Speaker 2: I know you need to cool down and we'll be back.
Speaker 3: Into class cocaine wine.
Speaker 2: All right, Elizabeth, Saron, we're back.
Speaker 3: We're back.
Speaker 2: Now. You may be wondering, Saron, we're talking.
Speaker 3: Cocaine, Saron, we're talking cocaine.
Speaker 2: Where is the crime? Yeah, where's you somehow have cocaine
Speaker 2: but no crime?
Speaker 3: How is that possible?
Speaker 2: I'm like, fair enough, Elizabeth, that is a fair point.
Speaker 2: The Coca Cola was able to change the laws, so
Speaker 2: what they did was not illegal. So we've just barely missed. Yeah,
Speaker 2: just throw it around it right. Well, so far there,
Speaker 2: we've only been kind of ridiculous. For more ridiculousness, let's
Speaker 2: talk Siggy Freud, father of the the ego, the super egos,
Speaker 2: talk therapy, dream therapy aka Freudian analysis, the whole bit.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 2: Freud, as it turns out, was a big time and
Speaker 2: I mean huge cocaine.
Speaker 3: Really, yes, I feel like I kind of knew that
Speaker 3: you might have heard about.
Speaker 2: It's like something you hear in the college dorm room,
Speaker 2: Like you know sigmand Freud, you like cocaine, You know
Speaker 2: the professor mentioned in class and they tell you have
Speaker 2: the story.
Speaker 3: Oh my god. It's like when someone takes a philosophy
Speaker 3: class then you have to hear about maybe we're brain
Speaker 3: in a jar. Get over it, dude, anyway, go ahead.
Speaker 2: So Freud to frame it in modern terms, Freud was
Speaker 2: the kind of cocide whould make Stevie Nick say.
Speaker 3: Damn son, oh really?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 2: Froyd was the kind of coked whould make John Belushi nervous?
Speaker 3: Did he have someone blow it up? As dude.
Speaker 2: Well, not quite. He didn't get to there, but it
Speaker 2: gets pretty the white witch, yo, Yeah, that's how she
Speaker 2: got it. When she blew out her nose. He blew
Speaker 2: out his nose too, we did. That's how much he
Speaker 2: loved cocaine, just like Stevie Nicks. To see Sigmund Freud,
Speaker 2: He's essentially why we have recreational cocaine. Really one man,
Speaker 2: almost single handedly, Freud made cocaine a thing. He's like,
Speaker 2: cocaine's a thing now thanks to Freud. But how how
Speaker 2: did Freud do it? Elizabeth? Great question?
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 2: Now remember how I told you about that academic paper
Speaker 2: about cocaine, the French chemist Angelo Marianni. He reads it
Speaker 2: and he's like, well, he wasn't the only one to
Speaker 2: read it. Not just cocaine wine spurned from that. Freud
Speaker 2: also he peeped academic papers. He read that. When he
Speaker 2: read others and a bunch of the medical minds, they
Speaker 2: all were coming to cocaine and seeing potential.
Speaker 7: Is it?
Speaker 2: He was part of this early wave of adopters. So
Speaker 2: who were these early coke lovers of academia? Elizabeth desperate,
Speaker 2: You're just hot with the questions. I am I'm just loving. Well,
Speaker 2: let's start with my man, Carl Caller. That's with a
Speaker 2: K and see Carl K. Caller, right, he was a
Speaker 2: twenty seven.
Speaker 3: Year old with a K collar with a K. Please
Speaker 3: don't let his middle name be Kevin.
Speaker 2: No, no, he's a German. So when he decided to
Speaker 2: experiment with cocaine compounds, who did he decide to experiment on, Elizabeth?
Speaker 3: Monkeys himself.
Speaker 2: He's like, I don't have money for monkeys. I got
Speaker 2: money for Carl and some cocaine. He wanted to see
Speaker 2: how cocaine worked as an anesthetic. That was the big
Speaker 2: deal originally, right, So you know what that's used for now?
Speaker 2: That was its original purpose. Yes, it remains so. And
Speaker 2: so it's he and a colleague. They made up a
Speaker 2: cocaine solution and then Coler loaded up his eyeballs with
Speaker 2: the solution like eye dropper. He did like an eye
Speaker 2: dropper thing there. So he found that it numbed his eyeballs,
Speaker 2: like he totally worked as an anesthetic, right, and so
Speaker 2: the tested he had his colleagues shoved pins into his eyeballs.
Speaker 2: But Elizabeth, good news is he couldn't feel the pins
Speaker 2: shoved into his eye when I'm imagining cocaine work.
Speaker 3: I have this problem that when I see like footage
Speaker 3: of someone getting hurt, or like someone describes something some
Speaker 3: sort of injury toil, I imagine it like I get
Speaker 3: like sharp pains in my legs.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, you're such an EmPATH. I know I'm afraid
Speaker 2: to get that.
Speaker 3: So like when you talk about that, I'm trying not
Speaker 3: to imagine it, and I say all sorts of horrific
Speaker 3: things because I had when I describe violent things, it's
Speaker 3: a cartoon.
Speaker 2: Yes, I've noticed that about you. Cartoonized.
Speaker 3: But like, especially like if I see one of those
Speaker 3: videos where like someone jumps a bike off something and
Speaker 3: then slams into a wall, I get like sharp pains
Speaker 3: in my legs.
Speaker 2: Is that I think you're very empathetic. You're basically feel
Speaker 2: their pain in a sense, or at least your mirror
Speaker 2: neurons imagine your mirror motor neurons go, oh, this is
Speaker 2: what it would feel like, and then you experience.
Speaker 3: I think I haven't so.
Speaker 2: Kelly Slater learned to surf a bunch really well in
Speaker 2: Florida's He watched all these videos and just thought about
Speaker 2: what they would do. And just wastely worked his muscles
Speaker 2: on other people's waves.
Speaker 3: Huh, well, I just think I have like an excess
Speaker 3: quantity of woosy in my body.
Speaker 2: I don't want to teach you about it.
Speaker 3: But you know, I'm embarrassed by No, you.
Speaker 2: Shouldn't be embarrassed. It's a good quality. And that is, honestly,
Speaker 2: how we became such a great spece is our ability
Speaker 2: to feel and to learn from.
Speaker 3: Other except for if you have cocaine in your eyes
Speaker 3: and you can't feel exactly.
Speaker 2: This was as a good transition to Elizabeth. Huge news
Speaker 2: for surgeons. We can now knock out. This is basically
Speaker 2: the first use of local antisset.
Speaker 3: I've had eye surgery. By the way, I wish they
Speaker 3: would have done this. I've don't want to It would
Speaker 3: have been better than what I had going on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, this is how an alley with a brick
Speaker 2: anesthetic was a brick anyway, you can numb an area
Speaker 2: of the body without putting a person all the way under.
Speaker 2: That's the genius of local anesthetic because people still die
Speaker 2: from going under, so there's a dangerous So if you
Speaker 2: have cocaine, you're like, oh, this helps us. This is great. Right,
Speaker 2: So before Coke met Kohler's eyeballs, doctors had to rely
Speaker 2: on chloroform. Ether it's kind of like clumsier versions. So
Speaker 2: soon enough medical profession they love it. They start saying
Speaker 2: in the praises of cocaine, it's all over academia. But
Speaker 2: the public doesn't know about this. They're not up on
Speaker 2: the latest anesthetics. So Robert Bartholow you wrote in eighteen
Speaker 2: ninety one about how it spread through medicine. Quote, no
Speaker 2: remedy in modern times, probably in any age of the world,
Speaker 2: has become so famous since so short a time as cocaine,
Speaker 2: and no remedy has so soon been subjected to the
Speaker 2: test of physiological experiment and clinical observation. Right, cocine is
Speaker 2: it now? Let's not get it twisted though, right as
Speaker 2: Europeans didn't discover cocaine, not anymore than they discovered the Americas.
Speaker 2: Because in South American societies and cultures, cocaine was a
Speaker 2: staple crop. It was revered as a gift from the gods.
Speaker 2: It was praised for its medicinal properties. It was very
Speaker 2: well known, but it was not used recreationally.
Speaker 3: No, didn't they chew on it?
Speaker 2: From on the lea. Yeah, when they wanted to stamina energy,
Speaker 2: long hikes on hunts. You know, it was used as
Speaker 2: a performance enhancing drug essentially.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, it was the Europeans who turned cocin into a
Speaker 2: recreational drug, just sitting around getting high on a couch. Right.
Speaker 2: So in the nineteenth century European scientists they got really
Speaker 2: good at isolating the active ingredients of plants. So in
Speaker 2: eighteen oh three it started with morphine. They had isolated
Speaker 2: it from opium or so from the poppy plant. And
Speaker 2: then eighteen twenty along comes caffeine. In quinine, they're isolated,
Speaker 2: very important, especially quinine from malaria. In eighteen twenty eight
Speaker 2: virgina tonics. Eighteen twenty eight, nicotine is isolated. And so
Speaker 2: then when you start making a lot of pesticides out
Speaker 2: in nicotine, oh yeah, that's in eighteen fifty nine science
Speaker 2: isolates the active ingredient from coca leaves. And so then
Speaker 2: I told you that same year Paulo Manka is that
Speaker 2: he writes his paper examining the properties of cocaine, launching
Speaker 2: off all the cocaine wine. But he also, as I said,
Speaker 2: inspired all these medical people. Right, So in his experiments.
Speaker 2: He documented the experiments, and he wrote in his documentary
Speaker 2: quote God is unjust because he made man incapable of
Speaker 2: sustaining the effects of coca all life long. I would
Speaker 2: rather live a life of ten with coca than one
Speaker 2: of one hundred one thousand without it.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: These people are like they are looked, yes, exactly now,
Speaker 2: like they're just about it right, Like Mary and Barry
Speaker 2: would be like, man, you need to calm down, like
Speaker 2: real though, So that first paper would not only spy,
Speaker 2: as I said, the French chemist to make cocoine, but
Speaker 2: also inspired the Viennes medical student looking for a path
Speaker 2: to wealth and fame akas Ziggy Freud. Now, but at first, Elizabeth,
Speaker 2: I one more doc for you. Enter William Halstead. You
Speaker 2: know who William Halstead is. He's the fatherner of modern surgery. Okay, right,
Speaker 2: so he's like it all basically traces back to him
Speaker 2: and his like ideas about like what if we put
Speaker 2: him under what if we like wash your hand?
Speaker 3: And I'm sure you love him because you love surgery websites.
Speaker 2: I do.
Speaker 3: This is a lot of times when you come in
Speaker 3: here to headquarters and you'll be giggling and you'll say
Speaker 3: look at this, and you'll show me something, and then
Speaker 3: my legs.
Speaker 2: It goes back in the body of like he's been degloved.
Speaker 2: But they get it all back on anyway, my man,
Speaker 2: he was, as he said, father modern surgery. He also
Speaker 2: goes all in on cocaine and the anesthetic properties of
Speaker 2: cocaine because as a surgeon, this is huge for him, right.
Speaker 2: So the problem though for him was cocaine messed him
Speaker 2: up like he was an eighties pop star. Halstead he's
Speaker 2: working in New York at the time as a surgeon.
Speaker 2: But then he starts doing too much stuff experimentation like
Speaker 2: all the others, and he starts not showing up at
Speaker 2: work at the hospital. He starts to fail to show
Speaker 2: up for teen exactly. He gets so bad that one
Speaker 2: day he shows up for work as a surgeon in
Speaker 2: a busy New York hospital, lots of people. Everyone's like,
Speaker 2: oh frantic, there's blood on the floor. He's coked up
Speaker 2: to the gills. He tries to operate, he can't trust
Speaker 2: his surgeon's hands. He backs away from the patient right
Speaker 2: and he says, I can't operate. He then son he
Speaker 2: walks out of the operation theater. He goes home and
Speaker 2: he's like, I need to do more cocaine about it.
Speaker 2: This is terrible.
Speaker 3: Get that'll fix it.
Speaker 2: He then spends the next seven months in alone in
Speaker 2: his apartment getting high on his miracle drug.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Finally, in eighteen eighty six, Ill said's like, I
Speaker 2: think I have a problem. He checks into Butler Hospital.
Speaker 2: It's good for him, producer Dave's hometown of Providence, Rhode Island.
Speaker 2: So he got treated for cocaine addiction, you know, and
Speaker 2: so he gets released. But unfortunately he was not able
Speaker 2: to get that monkey off his back. He went on
Speaker 2: to become a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine,
Speaker 2: teaching all these new doctors what he's created, these new
Speaker 2: ways of surgery. And while he's doing this, he's also
Speaker 2: blowing rails of.
Speaker 3: Coke, Like while he's teaching class. I like to imagine that.
Speaker 2: This is Chuck. Don't worry about it, Chuck so Halsted.
Speaker 2: He's never able to get free of the cocaine monkey
Speaker 2: on his back. He was just one of the early
Speaker 2: cautionary tales now of the hour.
Speaker 3: He I mean, he got his life back together though.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he was able to get his career back together.
Speaker 2: That was about it. Everything else kind of Feld to this.
Speaker 2: It was a rough one for old Uh yeah, Halsted,
Speaker 2: Now are man of the hour. Zicky Freud the godfather
Speaker 2: of recreational cocaine. Now I'm not being facetious when I
Speaker 2: say this, Elizabeth, Yes, sorry to god. Dominick straight failed
Speaker 2: the author of Cocaine, an unauthorized biography. He's the guy
Speaker 2: who literally wrote the book on cocaine. Literally, so anyway,
Speaker 2: he wrote this his book Cocaine quote that if there
Speaker 2: is one person who could be held responsible for the
Speaker 2: emergence of cocaine as a recreational pharmaceutical, it was Freud.
Speaker 2: It's not just me. It's also straight film anyway. As
Speaker 2: I know, earlier, all the time cocaine was still legal.
Speaker 2: So this is we're in a legal phase right at
Speaker 2: the time. I'm Freud and his coke had medical buddies.
Speaker 2: They're doing legal, pharmaceutical grade cocaine, not street cut stuff.
Speaker 2: They're just doing like straight from like the pharmacists right now,
Speaker 2: if you can believe it, Freud first started doing coke
Speaker 2: to treat nasal lesions. He had these sores in his
Speaker 2: nose and he found the cocaine numb the pain.
Speaker 3: Why did he have so he.
Speaker 2: Didn't tell me, and then he noticed it. It made
Speaker 2: him feel really good, like really good.
Speaker 3: He's like, all these ideas.
Speaker 2: To keep doing that, right, So I think Freud would
Speaker 2: agree that cocaine is likely the favorite drug of the ego. Yeah,
Speaker 2: So anyway, he orders up some of the more cocaine.
Speaker 2: He starts to experiment on himself, because that's just what
Speaker 2: you do. He receives his first delivery from quote Angels Pharmacy.
Speaker 2: That's what's the spot. The year is eighteen eighty four,
Speaker 2: one year of cocaine. Later, in eighteen eighty five, Freud
Speaker 2: ready to go public with his new love. He's like,
Speaker 2: let's make this Facebook official. So he wrote a medical
Speaker 2: treatise called uber Coca. All right, just right to the
Speaker 2: point you described everything quote was the most gorgeous excitement.
Speaker 2: He also wrote the quote if fun works intensive while
Speaker 2: under the influence of coca, after three to five hours,
Speaker 2: there is a decline in the feeling of well being,
Speaker 2: and the further dose of coca is necessary in order
Speaker 2: to ward off fatigue. Okay, so right, so Fredi discovered
Speaker 2: what the users called the moors, right which is basically, oh,
Speaker 2: I just want more code, right, But he argues that
Speaker 2: this is not the case. He writes, quote, it seems
Speaker 2: to me notimory that I discovered this in myself and
Speaker 2: and other observers who are capable of judging such things.
Speaker 2: At the first dose or even repeated doses of coca
Speaker 2: produced no compulsive desire to use the stimulants. Further, on
Speaker 2: the contrary, once he was a certain unmotivated aversion to
Speaker 2: the substance, which is a total lie. I might keep
Speaker 2: telling yourself that, Elizab, but you have to keep in
Speaker 2: mind the time Freud was a young man. He was
Speaker 2: one with a medical degree, but also he was importantly
Speaker 2: Freud had a politically radical father. He had a big
Speaker 2: shadow cast over him, and his father was ruining his
Speaker 2: potential in a very conservative Vienna. Oh yeah, his professional
Speaker 2: life was a nightmare thanks to Pops.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 2: So Freud, he found the cocaine made all his worries
Speaker 2: and anxieties go away, and thus he concluded the cocaine
Speaker 2: would also be a perfect to give to morphine addicts.
Speaker 2: So Freud first had learned about cocaine from a medical
Speaker 2: journal called Therapeutic Gazette, so that's what kind of framed
Speaker 2: his thinking. But the journal wasn't unbased science. This was
Speaker 2: owned by a pharmaceutical company, Park Davis, which is now
Speaker 2: a subsidiary offizer. Yeah, and anyway, as he started to
Speaker 2: write about the joys of cocaine, the pharma company paid
Speaker 2: Freud twenty four dollars to spread the good word of cocaine.
Speaker 2: So now he's cocaine's poster boy, and it's pitch man. Anyway,
Speaker 2: he goes on. Meanwhile, Fred, he starts to recommend it
Speaker 2: to his colleagues at the university. He's recommending coke to
Speaker 2: his friends, his family, people on the street. He even
Speaker 2: told his fiance people, Yeah, you gotta try this cocaine.
Speaker 2: Now I got some right here. Toll takes this. It say,
Speaker 2: a good hand in my pocket. So Marta Burnet is
Speaker 2: that's his fiance. He's writing to her these all these
Speaker 2: letters because you know the time, you gotta write letters.
Speaker 2: And in his letters just always cocaxed thish oh Man.
Speaker 2: He's telling her like Freud relied on basically cocaine for
Speaker 2: confidence and crucial moments, and he'd meet people he admired,
Speaker 2: he'd want to impress him and well, Elizabeth, right than
Speaker 2: me tell you about this. I'd like you to close
Speaker 2: your eyes and to picture it as a close eighteen
Speaker 2: eighty six on the continent Europe, to be exact. And
Speaker 2: you are on a carriage ride, and this is a
Speaker 2: delightful day. A soft greaze pushes the air around in
Speaker 2: a fun, flirtatious way. The sound of the carriage wheels
Speaker 2: and the horse hoofs is like a white noise machine.
Speaker 2: That is, if you knew what one of those were.
Speaker 2: You don't. It's the nineteenth century. They'd get to be invented. Anyway.
Speaker 2: You're on this carriage ride, Elizabeth, with you as a
Speaker 2: young Sigmund Freud, and you, Elizabeth, are tight with Freud.
Speaker 2: I mean so tight because you are the cocaine monkey
Speaker 2: on his back, not a literal cocaine money. No, no, no,
Speaker 2: you were Freud's voice of addiction.
Speaker 3: But I thought I was cocaine.
Speaker 2: Yeah. No, you are the voice of Freud's voice of addiction.
Speaker 2: At the moment you and the young doctor are on
Speaker 2: your way to see his mentor and teacher of the
Speaker 2: French psychiatrist Jean Martin Carco. Of course, you've you've been
Speaker 2: there with Freud days earlier, when he wrote a letter
Speaker 2: to his fiance, reading it aloud to him. So you
Speaker 2: recall how he explained his excitement to his fiance, saying,
Speaker 2: Chako has invited me, along with Ratchetti, to visit him
Speaker 2: at his home tomorrow Tuesday, after dinner. Many people will
Speaker 2: be in attendance. You can easily recall the mix of
Speaker 2: trepidation and elation in Freud's reading voices. He continued to
Speaker 2: read it his own letter before sending it off. I'm
Speaker 2: sure you can imagine my apprehension mixed with curiosity and pride.
Speaker 2: White gloves, white tie and even a new shirt, a
Speaker 2: visit to the barber for what little hair I have left,
Speaker 2: and a little cocaine to loosen my tongue. That last
Speaker 2: part was, of course your idea. You whispered that into
Speaker 2: Freud's ear, feeling a little nervous, Siggie, you should do
Speaker 2: some coke about it. And now the big day has come,
Speaker 2: and Freud does as you suggested then and again now
Speaker 2: you suggest he danced with that white devil you love
Speaker 2: to whisper chaos into his ears. And the thing is,
Speaker 2: Freud listens to you, out comes his little container of cocaine,
Speaker 2: and with two snorts, Freud feels that familiar cool sensation
Speaker 2: run down his spine. Oh, that sweet devil cocaine, you
Speaker 2: whisper in his ear. Freud relaxes into the seat of
Speaker 2: his carriage as the sounds of horses and carriage wheels
Speaker 2: pull him even closer to his mentor's house. You whisper
Speaker 2: in his ear again. Freud listens a little more cocaine.
Speaker 2: What a good idea, he thinks, you know, to give him,
Speaker 2: you know, what a little ease from his worries. Oh,
Speaker 2: another mile or two to go. We're almost there. But
Speaker 2: maybe there's just another time, a little bit of time
Speaker 2: for maybe another Freud stays busy, getting high as giraffe
Speaker 2: eyebrows in this carriage. He's like Vienna's Rick Ross at
Speaker 2: this point, right, and you, Elizabeth, are so happy for him,
Speaker 2: because chaos rains. Finally, the carriage arrives at the destination.
Speaker 2: Just before the footmot hops down from the back and
Speaker 2: comes around and opens the doors. Freud tops off. You've
Speaker 2: now convinced Freud to get completely suited before walking into
Speaker 2: the home of his mentor. At this point, you laughably
Speaker 2: imagine Freud mashing his teeth side to side as he
Speaker 2: dominates the conversation. Freud coming off like a yiked out hunter,
Speaker 2: s Thompson. The carriage doors swing open, the footman offers
Speaker 2: a hand to Freud, and you, giddy with excitement, ride
Speaker 2: on Freud's back as he takes his first unsteady step
Speaker 2: out of the carriage, off to see his mentor. How
Speaker 2: much did Freud love cocaina live?
Speaker 3: Oh my god?
Speaker 2: How much did he rely on her? To Calmas social
Speaker 2: anxiety one his own words. In another letter with his Boo,
Speaker 2: Freud confided how he'd been doing so much below at
Speaker 2: the time that he could hardly sleep. He said, I
Speaker 2: was offering from migraines, the third attack this week, by
Speaker 2: the way, although I'm otherwise in excellent health. I took
Speaker 2: some cocaine, watched the migraines vanish at once, went on
Speaker 2: writing my paper as well as it let to professional Mendo.
Speaker 2: But I was so wound up that I had to
Speaker 2: go on working and writing and couldn't get to sleep
Speaker 2: before four in the morning. But I find it hilarious
Speaker 2: about Freud's letters that the good doctor somehow misses the
Speaker 2: fact that maybe, just maybe, his miracle drug is the
Speaker 2: problem for him. He keeps saying, no, this is everything,
Speaker 2: it's the best everything. It's the other things. I don't
Speaker 2: know that hay fever and allergies. So he's like he's
Speaker 2: got Pandora's box, right, big shiny box, and he's now
Speaker 2: dumped it over like cocaine on Don Henley's glass top table.
Speaker 2: He's just this is awesome. Anyway. Well, let's take a
Speaker 2: little break, Elizabeth, and after this I'll be back to
Speaker 2: tell you how Freud may cocaine further the thing, not
Speaker 2: just for himself but for everybody.
Speaker 5: Oh no, Elizabeth, Oh Zaren.
Speaker 2: Do you know how Freud came up with his idea
Speaker 2: for talk therapy cocaine? I mean, think about it. It
Speaker 2: makes perfect sense. Oh yeah, yeah, what is like to do?
Speaker 2: Talk about themselves, their preoccupations, their fears, their worries. Right,
Speaker 2: of course a koke would invent talk therapy. Yeah, it's right.
Speaker 2: Why do we miss this?
Speaker 3: Anyway?
Speaker 2: We have a Freud coked up like Kerry Fisher in
Speaker 2: her prime, and he's got all these rich Viennese folks
Speaker 2: swinging by his office and he's like, you need to
Speaker 2: just open up and talk. Let it happen. You know what,
Speaker 2: just like you say whatever you're thinking. And so this
Speaker 2: is how cocaine's first spreads amongst the elite, right him
Speaker 2: telling everybody how great it is, and they're like, oh, man,
Speaker 2: I do feel better, and I don't even care about
Speaker 2: my mother or whatever it is that their concern is. Meanwhile,
Speaker 2: remember I said Freud thought coke would be the perfect
Speaker 2: thing to give to a morphine addict to treat the addiction,
Speaker 2: which is like the worst idea I could think of
Speaker 2: to give a morphine joy other than morphine is the
Speaker 2: cocaine habit. Anyway, Enter Freud's buddy or van Fleischel Maxau.
Speaker 2: He was the aforementioned morphine junkie. He was also a
Speaker 2: medical cata physiologist. He'd suffered a catastrophic thumb injury while
Speaker 2: dissecting a corpse. The wound resulted in an infection followed
Speaker 2: by an amputation that left him with nerve pain. So
Speaker 2: he treated that with morphine quickly developed one hell of
Speaker 2: a habit. Freud thought he had an answer to his
Speaker 2: friend's trouble. He's like, you knowed you to maybe do
Speaker 2: some cocaine about it? Right, So he treated him. How
Speaker 2: I use that term loosely with copious amounts of cocaine.
Speaker 2: So what happens to his buddy Elizabeth? Oh god, you
Speaker 2: know what happens. He developed a cocaine habit like nobody's business.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he already has addiction issues, and.
Speaker 2: Now he's got a supplier who's pushing it on him,
Speaker 2: literally pushing it.
Speaker 3: On Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: And he starts doing so much coke he reaches toxic
Speaker 2: levels in his body. Right, So Freud's therapy pland is
Speaker 2: not working. His friend would eventually battle addiction for the
Speaker 2: next seven years of his life until he died of
Speaker 2: a premature death at age forty five.
Speaker 3: Wag Freud, Yeah, nice one.
Speaker 2: We're still was in. Freud, high on cocaine, became convinced
Speaker 2: that his buddy, another buddy of his, a doctor, should
Speaker 2: attempt a radical operation on one of his patients. You see,
Speaker 2: his own nose, as I told you, have been severely congested,
Speaker 2: just like Stevie Nicks. Now possibly you know from the
Speaker 2: coke habit. So Freud undergone an operation where a doctor
Speaker 2: sliced open one of his nostrils, cleared out all his
Speaker 2: coke blockage and damage or whatever. And Freud thought that
Speaker 2: his buddy could do the same thing on his patients.
Speaker 2: He's like, yeah, just slice open her nose will be perfect.
Speaker 2: Right oation gets botched, the woman suffers for the rest
Speaker 2: of her life. Writes about this in his book The
Speaker 2: Interpretation of Dreams, He records his own guilty dreams about
Speaker 2: his patient Irma. The tragedy drives him to do way
Speaker 2: more cocaine. I need to do cokebat it right. At
Speaker 2: this point, he was doing so much coke. He was
Speaker 2: experiencing regular chest pains, depression. He was doing so much
Speaker 2: coke he nearly imploded his career, his marriage. He still
Speaker 2: hadn't figured out that cocaine was to blame. He kept
Speaker 2: thinking it might be something out. He can't be this
Speaker 2: stuff that makes me feel awesome by that. He wouldn't
Speaker 2: stop doing blow until eighteen ninety six, when his politically
Speaker 2: radical father dropped dead. And you may recall that was
Speaker 2: when he has original reason to start experimenting with his father.
Speaker 2: His father dies. He quit the day after his father
Speaker 2: was put in the ground. One day after his funeral,
Speaker 2: He's like, I don't think I need cocaine anymore, you.
Speaker 3: Know, I wonder what Freud would say about it.
Speaker 2: I'm like, hey, tell me about your faza anyway. So
Speaker 2: Freud he quits cocin eighteen ninety six. Later on, Freud
Speaker 2: largely tried to bury his earlier enthusiasm, for he tried
Speaker 2: to act like he'd never been Johnny cokeseed, we have
Speaker 2: the receipts, right, it's there, right, So Freud he told
Speaker 2: the whole world cocazette. Then he was like, no, never mind,
Speaker 2: but people didn't hear that. Right. By that point it
Speaker 2: had spread, right, Yeah, and uh, you know, even though
Speaker 2: as I said, he quits, Pandora's box has been cracked
Speaker 2: cracked up down. So now we have Coca Cola, we
Speaker 2: have Freud. I told you one other one, who did
Speaker 2: I say, Charlock Holmes. Well, Elizabeth, remember also I told
Speaker 2: you cocaine was legal to the beginning of the twentieth century. Yeah,
Speaker 2: this is very important to remember. So I'll get into
Speaker 2: another story of another superfan of cocaine, Sherlock Holmes. Authors
Speaker 2: Lester Grinspoon and James B. Bacalar, they co wrote a
Speaker 2: book The Details the History of Cocaine, and they documented
Speaker 2: its social evolution. Of course they got to Sherlock Holmes. Yeah,
Speaker 2: because he loved that Bolivian marching powdery. As they wrote,
Speaker 2: doctor Watson Doyle's narrator first mentions cocaine in The Sign
Speaker 2: of the Flour, published in eighteen ninety. At that time,
Speaker 2: Holmes was injecting a seven percent solution intravenously three times
Speaker 2: a day, apparently a rather large dose, since Watson reports
Speaker 2: asking when he saw Holmes with the needle whether it
Speaker 2: was morphine or cocaine. Holmes seems to have had more
Speaker 2: than one drug habit, but we have no more of
Speaker 2: morphine from Watson. In the spirit of mock scholarship with
Speaker 2: which Sirlock Holmes studies are conducted, we might guess that
Speaker 2: Holmes is one of those addicts wo use cocaine to
Speaker 2: withdraw from morphine and simply replace one drug with another.
Speaker 2: Holmes admitted that cocaine was bad for him physically, but
Speaker 2: found it transcendentally stimulating and clarifying to the mind. Now,
Speaker 2: as the authors noted, Sherlock Holmes, he doesn't use cocaine
Speaker 2: as a performance enhancing drug. He uses it to relax.
Speaker 2: So again back to Greensman and Bacalar, they write that
Speaker 2: Sherlock Holmes quote did not use it when working on
Speaker 2: a case, but only did dispel boredom when he had
Speaker 2: nothing to do. Now, it may surprise some folks to
Speaker 2: learn that one of the great detectives of literature was
Speaker 2: an out and out cocatine. Yeah, right, Does it surprise you?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 2: I mean, I mean you knew, right, I'd kind of
Speaker 2: told you.
Speaker 3: Well, no, I've read it.
Speaker 2: You read a story.
Speaker 3: And their references in some of the adaptations like the film.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, some of the belts cover it. Yeah, but
Speaker 2: they often gets dropped out. Yeah, anyway, to make their case,
Speaker 2: the co authors, they documented all the appearances in all
Speaker 2: of his books. And there's cocaine right from the first book,
Speaker 2: all right. In a study in Scarlet, doctor Watson is
Speaker 2: worried about his friend's co cabit, doesn't quite mention it
Speaker 2: by name. It gets mentioned by name three years later
Speaker 2: in the next book, The Sign of the Four, Watson
Speaker 2: actually watches Holmes shoot up right, and he says, and
Speaker 2: I quote Charlotte, Holmes took his bottle from the corner
Speaker 2: of the mantelpiece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat
Speaker 2: Morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers. He adjusted
Speaker 2: the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt cuff.
Speaker 2: For some little time, his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the
Speaker 2: sinewy forearm and wrist, all dotted and scarred with innumerable
Speaker 2: puncture marks. Finally, he thrust the sharp point home, pressed
Speaker 2: down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet
Speaker 2: lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction. Now to me,
Speaker 2: that sounds like morphineus a cocaine.
Speaker 3: I was realized in reading it and then seeing I
Speaker 3: always thought it was that Holmes was supposed to be
Speaker 3: a morphine addict.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he speaks. Holmes specifically speaks to cocaine. He tells
Speaker 2: the Good Doctor at one point, I suppose that it's
Speaker 2: influence is physically a bad one. I find it, however,
Speaker 2: so trendscendentally stimulating and clarifying to the mind, that its
Speaker 2: secondary action is a matter of small moment. So he
Speaker 2: basically says, I don't care, it makes you feel good. Yeah,
Speaker 2: don't give me any So that's how the Great Detective
Speaker 2: helped glamorize cocaine. He give it a patina of elegance
Speaker 2: and sophistication similar to Freud right, but admittedly he didn't
Speaker 2: have to worry about fetanol like the modern users do.
Speaker 2: But even Victorian cocaine was still a no joke. It
Speaker 2: was pharmaceutical great. But anyway, Elizabeth, you still may be wondering, Jaren,
Speaker 2: where is the crime? You've kind of dogged. Yeah, it's
Speaker 2: a fantastic question, Elizabeth to answer that. Let's bring it
Speaker 2: back home to the US. Cocaine arrived in American soil
Speaker 2: in eighteen eighty four as a medical supply. As I've
Speaker 2: told you, right, it is mostly just with the doctors.
Speaker 2: By then, who's being mass produced by European chemical companies
Speaker 2: like Murk, And they're throwing it over this over the Atlantic, right,
Speaker 2: this new wonder drug. It gets outlawed in its first
Speaker 2: state three years later, in eighteen eighty seven, the state
Speaker 2: of Oregon. At that point, all the new stories about
Speaker 2: cocaine abuse were about doctors abusing it. So Oregon very
Speaker 2: small state. They can't have their few doctors abusing it,
Speaker 2: so they outlawed, Right, they're dipping into it. Two years later,
Speaker 2: Montana outlawed cocaine without a prescription, So, just like Oregon,
Speaker 2: it was more of an updated ban on their pre
Speaker 2: existing laws against opium and morphine, which was a racist
Speaker 2: preoccupation in the West because of Chinese laborers. Yeah, so Colorado.
Speaker 3: Sorry, it feels like cocaine though, was probably not prescribed
Speaker 3: for people to take away from the office. I think
Speaker 3: it was it because it seems like if the doctors
Speaker 3: are getting busted for it, it's something that is.
Speaker 2: It's not being administered in the doctor's office. They were
Speaker 2: being given various ways. There was like lozenges, there's gums,
Speaker 2: there's there are shots that they're administering, but there's also powders.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of different they're coming up. They don't
Speaker 2: know how to best give it to people today.
Speaker 3: Isn't it mostly used in dentistry.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's primarily an anesthetic cruised and dentistry in
Speaker 2: the in the office. Yeah, and the users a little
Speaker 2: tiny noodles thing. So Colorado, Illinois they soon follow suit.
Speaker 2: They update their narcotics laws. This is primarily in response,
Speaker 2: once again to abuse by doctors and pharmacists. Eighteen ninety three,
Speaker 2: the state of New York first big state to do it.
Speaker 2: They ban the use of cocaine without a doctor's note,
Speaker 2: again to limit recreational cocaine abuse. Same thing doctor's pharmacist.
Speaker 2: One month after cocaine had first rived in US, a
Speaker 2: Connecticut doctor he'd created a new product. I remember you
Speaker 2: were talking about they didn't know how to get cocaine
Speaker 2: into the body the best way. So he decides, oh,
Speaker 2: I mean, once again for medical purposes, He's going to
Speaker 2: create some way to fight the common cold with cocaine.
Speaker 2: So he grinds up menthol and cocaine and some milk
Speaker 2: sugar and he sells this as a medical snuff.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 2: It's just you can do the white powder and you
Speaker 2: can just snort it. So he thought it would open
Speaker 2: up the nostrils. What it did was create a quick
Speaker 2: and easy way to recreationally do cocaine. Young folks love it.
Speaker 2: They start calling it sniff and cocaine.
Speaker 5: There.
Speaker 2: You got to get that sniff and cocaine. It becomes
Speaker 2: the new drug ad choice. Soon enough, there's news headlines
Speaker 2: documenting this new moral panic. This headline's like boy slave
Speaker 2: to cocaine or that was from the Chicago Tribune eighteen
Speaker 2: ninety six.
Speaker 3: This general mood, all these stories milk powdery you said,
Speaker 3: milk sugar, milk sugar. Yeah, still it's interesting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, does that make it sweet, not too sweet? Who'd
Speaker 2: be really crystal? And it's kind of a flaky, dry sugar.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 2: Anyway, they're basically the stories. The moral panic is that
Speaker 2: cocaine is fueling the white slave trade. That's what they think.
Speaker 2: The white slave trade is being run on cocaine. That's
Speaker 2: what this is the new story, say Elizabeth, All these
Speaker 2: like white girls and boys are going into the big.
Speaker 3: City and Jimmy and.
Speaker 2: Then yeah, they're being like suckered into warehouses by people
Speaker 2: with like cocaine. I don't know. These are the stories.
Speaker 2: It becomes this consistent theme, right for two decades. In
Speaker 2: nineteen twelve, the New York Tribune ran the headline Cocaine
Speaker 2: an ally of the white slavers. It just they just
Speaker 2: keep doing the same stories over and over again. Right
Speaker 2: despite all these screaming headlines about lost white youth. Yea,
Speaker 2: the moral panic never takes hold of people's imaginations and
Speaker 2: nothing's really happening. The story starts to shift. In eighteen
Speaker 2: ninety eight, a Chicago paper wrote a story about a
Speaker 2: cocaine club where black people gathered in secret and they
Speaker 2: blew rails of this new hip drug. And the paper
Speaker 2: wrote and I quote yesterday, the following invitations were sent
Speaker 2: to a number of prospective members. You are cordially invited
Speaker 2: to attend a coke party given by the Colored Cocaine
Speaker 2: Club at its hall on December twenty third at three pm.
Speaker 2: There was a large attendance. An Ramsey, a depraved negress
Speaker 2: who was known as the Queen of the Cocaine Fiends,
Speaker 2: sniffed the drug up her nostrils until her nose was
Speaker 2: swollen and split open. She is the ruling spirit of
Speaker 2: these gatherings. So in these news stories right, setting aside
Speaker 2: the casual racism, coke was shown as the ruiner of people. Right,
Speaker 2: fears of black people doing coke were largely non existent
Speaker 2: and mostly focused on the cocaine, not the black people.
Speaker 2: But then as the century turned Elizabeth, cocaine sniffing became
Speaker 2: the drug a choice for working men, in particular black
Speaker 2: waterfront dock workers and Steve Adoors. They helped spread the
Speaker 2: drug across the South, first up and down the Mississippi,
Speaker 2: and we see all these states start banning cocaine all
Speaker 2: along the Mississippi River. It makes its way into New
Speaker 2: Orleans and the Forum from there to the former plantation workers.
Speaker 2: Now it starts showing up in what would be the
Speaker 2: the predecessors of juke joints. People are doing it on
Speaker 2: the weekend.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The white planters are stoked about cocaine because the black
Speaker 2: field workers worked longer and they were more productive, so
Speaker 2: they were like, yeah, the white planters started growing cocaine
Speaker 2: giving it out to the field hands. It was like
Speaker 2: coffee in a breakway. We're oh, yeah, there's just handed
Speaker 2: cocaine out right. The popularity cocaine spreads across the South right,
Speaker 2: especially in New Orleans because it's a party city. This
Speaker 2: would soon lead to a new wave of racialized fears
Speaker 2: of negroes running them up high on cocaine. The typical
Speaker 2: Southern fears of black people getting their bloody vengeance on
Speaker 2: white folks start creeping north with these news stories. Right
Speaker 2: the Atlanta Journal Constitution, my hometown paper, they published a
Speaker 2: story a nineteen hundred two negro women engage in a
Speaker 2: bloody fight and cocaine dive. Another AJC headline from the
Speaker 2: same time, frightful spread of habit among the Negroes. My
Speaker 2: favorite is from November twenty eighth to nineteen hundred Senators
Speaker 2: visit cocaine sniffers. I don't know what the story is
Speaker 2: there now, there wasn't Atlanta copy. They quoted in the
Speaker 2: Ajac and the cocaine says, cocaine makes the Negroes quiet
Speaker 2: and inoffensive. And if we have less trouble, cocaine victims
Speaker 2: in with whiskey victims. So they're like all about it.
Speaker 2: The cops are saying, we're cool with it, doesn't matter.
Speaker 2: New York papers they start running similar stories as the
Speaker 2: southern headlines started getting syndicated all across the country. This
Speaker 2: wave builds over the decade. In nineteen oh five, the
Speaker 2: New York Times publishes a story, Negro Cocaine evil. That's
Speaker 2: all it is, just three words, Negro cocaine evil. No story,
Speaker 2: that's just said. It was about cocaine the Southern States.
Speaker 2: So all these Northerners are worried about what's happening down
Speaker 2: to our brothers in the South. I guess I don't
Speaker 2: know right. So later on nineteen twelve, the New York
Speaker 2: Times story there's another one. This one's about the local habits.
Speaker 2: It says Cuban Negroes introduced a cocaine vice in New
Speaker 2: York Merk introduced the cocaine price in New York anyway,
Speaker 2: This just general ambient racist trend eventually culminated in a
Speaker 2: corker of a New York Times magazine story published February
Speaker 2: nineteen fourteen, with the very unsubtle headline Negro cocaine fiends
Speaker 2: are a new Southern menace. That published story which was incorrect.
Speaker 2: Mind you detailed accounts of coke mad negroes, and the
Speaker 2: article is written by one doctor Edward Huntington will You,
Speaker 2: who was a local moral skold. He featured lines in
Speaker 2: his article like nine men killed in Mississippi by craz's
Speaker 2: cocaine takers, five in North Carolina, three in Tennessee. These
Speaker 2: are the facts that need no imaginative coloring. Why do
Speaker 2: they need no imaginative coloring, Elizabeth, because of racism. The
Speaker 2: reader's already been primed to imagine the black men committing
Speaker 2: the crimes.
Speaker 3: Did they really happen?
Speaker 7: No.
Speaker 2: The purported news story included a tale of a cocaine
Speaker 2: stiffing negro who was in vulnerable to the effects of guns.
Speaker 2: Bullets bounced off his coke addled body. A direct gunshot
Speaker 2: to the heart, Elizabeth, a direct gunshot to the heart.
Speaker 2: In the story is quote did not even stagger the man.
Speaker 2: The new story reported how this incident and one's like it,
Speaker 2: had spurred Southern cops to purchase quote guns of greater
Speaker 2: shocking power. So they wanted stoppers because he got these,
Speaker 2: you know, bulletproof negroes running own cocaine. The real story,
Speaker 2: by the way, Elizabeth, since you did ask, had been
Speaker 2: published by The New York Times one year earlier, in
Speaker 2: nineteen thirteen. In the original reporting, it was two brothers,
Speaker 2: not one bulletproof negro cocine. The brothers did act violently,
Speaker 2: and in response, three innocent black men were killed by
Speaker 2: a white mob as retribution. But what do facts matter
Speaker 2: when you got a good racialized scare campaign.
Speaker 3: To build dude who like trash his own house during
Speaker 3: all the George Floyd of rising and then wrote Black's
Speaker 3: rule in the driveway.
Speaker 2: So we have there's there's there's our crime. All right,
Speaker 2: we got I got a one percent. Somebody did get hurt, right,
Speaker 2: I felt that one percent was important to include. But
Speaker 2: so that same year, as that crazy racist New York
Speaker 2: Times story runs, it finally grips the America followed nineteen
Speaker 2: fourteen folks down to Washington. They act on this imagined threat.
Speaker 2: Lawmakers passed new legislation, federal legislation, the Harrison Act. After that,
Speaker 2: it makes cocaine illegal without a prescription across the United States. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that coke usage drops off, then the hip they move
Speaker 2: on to heroin. We got new drugs.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: Cocaine becomes a crime when black people were doing the
Speaker 2: same arical drug as freud. So there's there's our ridiculous
Speaker 2: crime when folks with field sweat on their backs enjoyed
Speaker 2: the preferred pastime of popes and a queen and Sherlock Holmes.
Speaker 2: Once it did, the melanated folks started snow from cocaine
Speaker 2: and private clubs of colored cocaine enthusiasts. Yeah, that, Elizabeth
Speaker 2: is when cocaine became a drug menace. But you know what,
Speaker 2: good and honestly, in my opinion, cocaine is a menace.
Speaker 2: It should be a regulated substance. It's it's too much
Speaker 2: for the human animal. I mean, look at everybody's reaction
Speaker 2: to it, like this is amazing. It's not a powder
Speaker 2: meant for It's a powderman for gods, not mere mortals.
Speaker 2: That's my thought. I think the South Americans were right.
Speaker 2: We're like, this is some god stuff, right man. I
Speaker 2: know I'm kind of making it sound good. I don't
Speaker 2: mean to. It's not. Coca is terrible, and you know what,
Speaker 2: I want coke to be illegal. But anyway that is
Speaker 2: out coke and our history with it became illegal ridiculous
Speaker 2: and ridiculous. So that's a ridiculous takeaway, Elizabeth.
Speaker 3: Don't do drugs, don't do coke. Yes, that's my big takeaway.
Speaker 3: And also, like the people people all coked out don't
Speaker 3: know how obnoxious they are. In their minds. They're thinking
Speaker 3: they're just like the funniest, like quickest, cutest thing, and
Speaker 3: oh my goodness.
Speaker 2: Yes, I would love you be able to show them
Speaker 2: the difference.
Speaker 3: So yeah, all teeth grinding now for.
Speaker 2: Me once again, thank you for asking.
Speaker 3: A little Yeah, yeah, I want to know.
Speaker 2: My ridiculous takeaway is is well, I thought of like
Speaker 2: the Chinese folks in the West, they could have been like,
Speaker 2: we could have told you how this would play out,
Speaker 2: because one generation earlier they had dealt with this with
Speaker 2: the opium line. Yeah, and that was because of the
Speaker 2: people in the West wanted to lessen the power of
Speaker 2: fast growing Chinese wealth. So they're like, oh, it's come
Speaker 2: off with this. We'll legalize all of them. We'll make
Speaker 2: it a problem. We could be suspicious of anyone with money. Yeah, anyway,
Speaker 2: that was a generation earlier. So really there's truly nothing
Speaker 2: new under the sun. Not a lick anyway. That's all
Speaker 2: I got for you, but the history of cocaine and
Speaker 2: why we have talk therapy US. You can online a
Speaker 2: Ridiculous Crime on Twitter, Instagram. We have a website ridiculous
Speaker 2: Crime dot com, and we also like your talkbacks emails
Speaker 2: if you want at Ridiculous Crime at gmail dot com.
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening. We'll catch your next crime. Ridiculous Crime
Speaker 2: is supposed to by Elizabeth Dutton and Zaron Burnette, produced
Speaker 2: and edited by our resident cocaine hippo caretaker Dave Cousten.
Speaker 2: Research is by Mursa, I Don't Dance with that, Blow
Speaker 2: Brown and Andre Yeah. Anime is my cocaine song, Sharpened Tear.
Speaker 2: Our theme song is by Thomas Keep It Natural Lee
Speaker 2: and Travis I prefer Pepsi Dunton. The host wardrobe provided
Speaker 2: by Botany five hundred. Executive producers are Ben Did you
Speaker 2: know that Keith Richards once started a line of his
Speaker 2: own father's ashes bowling and Noel, Yeah, I did you
Speaker 2: told me that brown?
Speaker 4: Okay, So I just had to try the Snoop cereal.
Speaker 4: So I went to Walmart and I bought it. It
Speaker 4: was one ninety eight. I got the frosted drizzlers.
Speaker 7: And I'm going to try them. These are really good.
Speaker 4: These were really good, so continuing from the last one,
Speaker 4: they're really not really really sweet. I think they're just
Speaker 4: a little bit sweeter than the frosted miniwheeds. They're a
Speaker 4: lot cheaper too. I think they're really delicious. They're really good.
Speaker 4: I can't stop eating them. Definitely try them out.
Speaker 6: Ridicous Crime, Say it one more Timeous Crime.
Speaker 1: Ridiculous Crime is a production of iHeartRadio four more podcasts.
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