Freud credits Dr. Bentley's report in the Detroit Therapeutic Gazette with demonstrating the use of cocaine as a treatment for morphine and alcohol addiction. Freud elaborated on its antimorphine properties, reaching an extreme claim in this part of his first paper: cocaine was so powerful a specific to morphine-addiction as well as alcoholism that "inebriate asylums can be entirely dispensed with". Ueber Coca concluded with brief comments on cocaine's use in asthma, as an aphrodisiac and, lastly, in local applications as an anesthetic. Its anesthetic effects are sketched in only one paragraph, a brevity for which Freud later reproached himself, since Roller's anesthetic application, made public a month after publication of Ueber Coca , eventually was the most applauded use of cocaine and remained so for years to come.

As we have already noted, coca and cocaine were received in America with interest and fairly widespread use. By 1885, the Parke, Davis Company had printed a monograph for physicians summarizing medical experience with the various forms

of the coca plant. The introduction to this sizable paper captured its message in a few words:

[Coca is] a drug which through its stimulant properties,

can supply the place of food, make the coward brave, the silent eloquent, free the victims of alcohol and opium habit from their bondage, and, as an anaesthetic render the sufferer insensitive to pain, and make attainable to the surgeon heights of what may be termed, "aesthetic surgery" never

reached before.

Not only could one buy a handy cocaine case with all the instruments for the various applications of cocaine, and over a dozen forms of the substance, (eg, coca cordial), but even cigarettes and cheroots made from the coca leaf. Parke, Davis and Com pany, needing to establish that their cocaine was as pure as the German variety, had offered Freud the equivalent of $24 to test theirs against Merck's. Freud reported that it was just as good, noting only a slightly perceptible difference in taste, all of which "indicate the greatest future for the Parke cocaine" [August 1885]

-p. 367, Cocaine Papers by Sigmund Freud, edited by Robert Byck, M.D. and Anna Freud (1974)

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