Before he'd thought of putting patients on the couch, the young Sigmund Freud did a lot of coke, and here is the whole sordid story. Desperate to make his reputation quickly, he read and swallowed, without question, claims made by an American pharmaceutical company, Parke-Davis, on behalf of their new "wonder drug," cocaine hydrochloride. He ordered a gram and though he would claim, for years, that it was not addictive, his first taste led him to another and another, forming a habit that would last for 15 years. Situating his cocaine experiments in an introspective drug-using tradition that has included William James, Aldous Huxley, Havelock Ellis, and Timothy Leary, this book explores its influence on Freud's later thought and the subsequent relationship between psychology, psychiatry, drugs, and culture. It also includes analysis of the modern cocaine trade. As even President Obama, an admitted past cocaine user himself, acknowledges the legitimacy of questioning the global "War on Drugs," this is a timely, secret history of how that war began.
