COCAINE USE NOTHING NEW

Cocaine use is rampant in society today, as seen by the number of
large-scale drug busts held in Lafourche Parish this year, but according to
historians, this is not the first time cocaine is considered an epidemic by
law enforcement.

Last week, the Thibodaux Police Department conducted a drug roundup that
targeted 30 people in the city, most of them on distribution charges
involving crack cocaine. Over the past several months, the Thibodaux Police
and Lafourche Parish Sheriff's Office have had at least three other similar
operations, also targeting crack cocaine dealers throughout the city and
the parish.

The crack cocaine craze is believed to have first surfaced sometime in the
1970s, according to a report by the U.S. News and World Report. It began
with coca paste, derived from the leaves of the coca plant, and a cocaine
freebase made with ether, both of which are considered crack's predecessors.

When Colombian law enforcement officials managed to temporarily halt the
flow of drugs through the Colombia-Florida drug pipeline by stopping the
importation of ether, traffickers began shipping the unrefined coca paste
to the Caribbean, the magazine report said.

From there, the drug was shipped to South Florida for the transition into
powder cocaine.

While the smoking of coca paste quickly became popular in the Caribbean,
the substance never took hold in the United States, the report said.
Instead, consumers found recipes for cocaine freebase, which is created
through a chemical process that "frees" base cocaine from the cocaine
hydrochloride powder. Crack cocaine is a freebase drug, but in those days,
freebase was not made using the easier baking soda recipes of today's drug
culture.

It was made using highly volatile methods, including ether and butane or
acetylene torches.

The danger of using cocaine freebase was seen nationally in June 1980, when
comedian Richard Pryor suffered third-degree burns over most of his body
after setting himself on fire while freebasing.

That incident made drug users more aware of the danger and caused them to
search for safer methods of making freebase. As a result, they came up with
the baking soda formulas that are used today in making crack, the report said.

While crack cocaine is still a relatively new drug, powder cocaine got its
start more than 140 years ago. According to the American Medical
Association (AMA), it began in Germany with a pharmacology student named
Albert Nieman.

In 1860, Nieman discovered a way to isolate cocaine alkaloid from the
leaves of the coca plant, which for centuries had been used by the Andean
people as a means of boosting energy and dispelling hunger. Due to its
energizing properties, cocaine soon became seen as a "cure-all" for various
physical illnesses and nervous conditions.

In 1863, a man named Angelo Mariani created "Vin Mariani," a combination of
Bordeaux wine and cocaine that was dubbed as a "tonic and restorative," the
AMA said. The wine, which contained about 6 mg of cocaine per ounce, was
very popular and caused a number of people to try and imitate Mariani's
success.

One of those people, John Styth Pemberton, introduced an "intellectual
beverage" in 1885 that contained minute amounts of cocaine. That drink was
Coca-Cola.

Cocaine's popularity increased steadily until the late 1800s and early
1900s, when the first reports of cocaine addiction and related deaths were
published in medical literature, the AMA said. That, along with medical
advancements that made using cocaine as a medication unnecessary, caused a
massive movement against the drug.

By 1906, when the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed, companies such as
Coca-Cola were no longer using cocaine in their products and by the
beginning of World War II, every state in the country had anti-cocaine laws.

Cocaine was outlawed by the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914, the AMA report
said. While the decades immediately after cocaine's outlaw saw few cases of
cocaine's recreational use, that changed in the 1960s.

Since then, use of the drug and its derivative, crack, has been on the
rise, with Drug Enforcement Administration reports showing that in 1999,
nearly 4 million people used cocaine on a regular basis.