Who Made the Drug Coke or Who Invented It?
Question by killerace: who made the drug coke or who invented it?
Best answer:
Answer by Kaj
Cocaine is a processed derivative of a naturally occurring chemical found in the leaves of the coca family of plants, which are native to South America. The leaves have formed an important part of the culture of several Mesoamerican cultures for over a thousand years.
The specific alkaloid responsible was first isolated by German chemist Friedrich Gaedcke in 1855. Various other German chemists improved upon the isolation methods, and by 1879 the drug cocaine was starting to become an important medicinal compound due to its anaesthetic properties.
Answer by Conqueror Worm ©
For over a thousand years South American indigenous peoples have chewed the leaves of Erythroxylon coca, a plant that contains vital nutrients as well as numerous alkaloids, including cocaine. The coca leaf was, and still is, chewed almost universally by some indigenous communities. The remains of coca leaves have been found with ancient Peruvian mummies, and pottery from the time period depicts humans with bulged cheeks, indicating the presence of something on which they are chewing. There is also evidence that these cultures used a mixture of coca leaves and saliva as an anesthetic for the performance of trepanation.
When the Spanish arrived in South America, most at first ignored aboriginal claims that the leaf gave them strength and energy, and declared the practice of chewing it the work of the Devil. But after discovering that these claims were true, they legalized and taxed the leaf, taking 10% off the value of each crop.
In 1569, Nicolás Monardes described the practice of the natives of chewing a mixture of tobacco and coca leaves to induce “great contentment”: “When they wished to make themselves drunk and out of judgment they chewed a mixture of tobacco and coca leaves which make them go as they were out of their wittes.”
In 1609, Padre Blas Valera wrote: “Coca protects the body from many ailments, and our doctors use it in powdered form to reduce the swelling of wounds, to strengthen broken bones, to expel cold from the body or prevent it from entering, and to cure rotten wounds or sores that are full of maggots. And if it does so much for outward ailments, will not its singular virtue have even greater effect in the entrails of those who eat it?”
Although the stimulant and hunger-suppressant properties of coca had been known for many centuries, the isolation of the cocaine alkaloid was not achieved until 1855. Various European scientists had attempted to isolate cocaine, but none had been successful for two reasons: the knowledge of chemistry required was insufficient at the time.[citation needed] Additionally contemporary conditions of sea-shipping from South America could degrade the cocaine in the plant samples available to Europeans.
The cocaine alkaloid was first isolated by the German chemist Friedrich Gaedcke in 1855. Gaedcke named the alkaloid “erythroxyline”, and published a description in the journal Archiv der Pharmazie.
In 1856, Friedrich Wöhler asked Dr. Carl Scherzer, a scientist aboard the Novara (an Austrian frigate sent by Emperor Franz Joseph to circle the globe), to bring him a large amount of coca leaves from South America. In 1859, the ship finished its travels and Wöhler received a trunk full of coca. Wöhler passed on the leaves to Albert Niemann, a Ph.D. student at the University of Göttingen in Germany, who then developed an improved purification process.
Niemann described every step he took to isolate cocaine in his dissertation titled Über eine neue organische Base in den Cocablättern (On a New Organic Base in the Coca Leaves), which was published in 1860—it earned him his Ph.D. and is now in the British Library. He wrote of the alkaloid’s “colourless transparent prisms” and said that, “Its solutions have an alkaline reaction, a bitter taste, promote the flow of saliva and leave a peculiar numbness, followed by a sense of cold when applied to the tongue.” Niemann named the alkaloid “cocaine” from “coca” (from Quechua “cuca”) + suffix “ine”. Because of its use as a local anesthetic, a suffix “-caine” was later extracted and used to form names of synthetic local anesthetics.
The first synthesis and elucidation of the structure of the cocaine molecule was by Richard Willstätter in 1898. The synthesis started from tropinone, a related natural product and took five steps.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocaine#History
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