“COCAINE . . . is probably the most benign of illicit drugs currently in widespread use . . . and acutely pleasurable.”

So said Dr. Peter Bourne in 1974. Four years later as White House health policy adviser for President Jimmy Carter, Dr. Bourne was forced to resign because of charges of illicit drug use. Like many others, perhaps he thought he could justify the use of drugs for pleasure.

At one time cocaine was easily available to anyone almost anywhere​—at grocery stores, in saloons, and from mail-order vendors. During the 1880’s and 1890’s, it could be smoked in the form of coca-leaf cigarettes. It was imbibed in various wine and soft-drink concoctions. Even the popular English fictional detective Sherlock Holmes is portrayed as using cocaine “three times a day for many months.”​—The Sign of Four, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Cocaine was esteemed for its restorative properties and was hailed as a remedy for headache, asthma, hay fever, and toothache. It became the elixir for the masses. For example, in 1884 a youthful Sigmund Freud wrote: “I have tested this effect of coca, which wards off hunger, sleep, and fatigue and steels one to intellectual effort, some dozen times on myself . . . A first dose or even repeated doses of coca produce no compulsive desire to use the stimulant further.”​—Über Coca.

Cocaine and its derivative crack have been linked with paranoia and other schizophrenic symptoms, intense depression, insomnia, loss of appetite, sexual impotence, profound irritability, seizures, heart attacks, strokes, skin lesions or large blisters, loss of limbs and fingers, birth defects, upper respiratory infections, loss of sense of smell, and death. According to one science writer, “if cocaine use during pregnancy were a disease, its impact on infants would be considered a national health-care crisis.”