Freud on Coke

David Cohen explores Freud's 15-year cocaine habit, his reckless prescription of the drug as a young doctor, and the impact of Freud's 'cocaine episode' on both his later work and broad global drug policy. Includes sections on the subsequent relationship between psychiatry and LSD and the work of Huxley and Shulgin on Mescaline and Ecstasy.

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Before he thought of putting patients on the couch and interpreting their dreams, the young Sigmund Freud did a whole lot of coke amidst astonishing claims made by an American pharmaceutical company, Parker Davis, on behalf of their new 'wonder drug', cocaine hydrochloride. He tried it on patients with headaches, on practitioners of masturbation, on every depressive who came his way. Amazingly, he managed to overlook both the one legitimate use of cocaine - as a local anaesthetic - and the fact that its euphoric effect had no medicinal value.