Treating Depression With Cocaine
- Time Period: 1800s to 1912
Cocaine, like Heroin before it, has not always been something you find on the street. There used to be a medical use for it, and you’d be surprised just how many things cocaine was used for. In one of the more reliable uses, cocaine was very commonly used for colds or allergy issues. Hay Fever, for example, was a very easy thing for cocaine to treat. Keep in mind, cocaine is used primarily through snorting, so you can easily affect the sinuses this way. Of course, we now know that cocaine is a version of tropane alkaloid.
Yet it is also a stimulant, and it has been noted that the active ingredients in stimulants can help with allergy issues. Many decongestants use them today. Stimulants have also been known to help people with things like seasonal depression. Thus, cocaine used to be given to people who had depression issues as recently as the early 1900s. The euphoric effect of cocaine, along with the high it could offer, would naturally help people forget about depressing issues for a while. Sigmund Freud was said to be a huge fan of the treatment. The U.S. FDA finally banned it in 1912 via the Pure Food and Drug Act, however.