The coca plant, much like the poppy, has been around for ages. It is one of nature’s most durable creations, resistant to draught and disease. And in its native habitat it doesn’t ever require irrigation. It just grows. The earliest mention dates back 5,000 years, when South American Indians discovered simply chewing a wad of coca leaves produced mild euphoria and increased stamina, making life at higher altitudes all the better. I know this is getting redundant, but they considered coca a gift from their gods. So did the Peruvian Incas. They cultivated large coca plantations, using the harvest in all religious ceremonies and for just about everything else. Life was pretty good.

And then the Spaniards showed up. Defeating the more primitively armed Incas, the invading conquistadors took possession of all coca plantations. When Spanish priests traveling with the warriors found natives more interested in coca than Christ, the Catholic Church outlawed its use, labeling it “an evil agent of the Devil.” Also redundant.

But the Church soon changed its tune when Incas, deprived of their coca, became easily fatigued and unproductive workers, especially in the gold mines. And since doing God’s work didn’t come cheap, the Catholics turned cultivators, supplying coca to miners during frequent breaks. The new landlords were allowed to pay their Spanish taxes in coca leaf, introducing it to Western culture. We liked it too, although it wasn’t long before, as seemed to be our wont, we sought to make it better. And what we got was cocaine.

That was around 1860. Albert Niemann (1834-1861), a chemist at the University of Gottingen in Germany, isolated coca’s active ingredient, naming it cocaine. He died shortly after – the record is unclear how – and it would be another twenty years before ophthalmologists discovered cocaine to be the perfect local anesthetic. It was Viennese eye surgeon Karl Koller (1857-1944) who first popularized the practice, and the medical world took notice. So did the military.

In 1883 the Bavarian Army tasked German physician Theodore Aschenbrant with finding a military advantage in cocaine. Soldiers given cocaine remained normal in every respect, but endurance and performance levels were greatly enhanced. Seemed like a winner. Results of his study were published in a German medical journal, catching the eye of an ambitious Viennese neurologist, the infamous Sigmund Freud. To say Sigmund Freud liked cocaine would be a considerable understatement.

Freud became cocaine’s rainmaker, being paid by rival pharmaceutical companies to extol its virtues. And extol he did. He wrote enthusiastically about cocaine, most notably Uber Coca (1884), where many of cocaine’s medicinal benefits were correctly identified. He missed the mark badly, however, suggesting cocaine as an effective treatment for morphine and alcohol addiction, resulting in damage to his professional career. He suffered personally as well, something his own addiction bears out. But Freud wasn’t the only one enamored with cocaine.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, speaking through Sherlock Holmes in his second novel, The Sign of Four, praised cocaine as “so transcendentally stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action [addiction] is a matter of small concern.” Maybe. And Robert Louis Stevenson is said to have written, perhaps prophetically, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in just days while coked out of his skull. Writers…

And, of course, there were the businessmen. One enterprising Corsican, Angelo Mariani (1834-1914), developed a coca libation that proved to be a worldwide hit. It was in 1863 when Mariani discovered adding small amounts of cocaine to wine produced an invigorating tonic, one he label Vin Mariani. Kings and Queens and a Pope or two sang its praises, even Thomas Edison is said to have given glowing testimonials.