Anti Cocaine Research Paper

t name: Asiiat Askarova
Professor: Dr. Heidi Hoefinger
Course: SCI 301
Date: 09/15/2015

Cocaine, a substance of notoriety today, is certainly no new drug or menace on the global scene. From 1860, when first synthesized in a German lab from dried Peruvian coca leaf, to around the turn of the century, openly legal and legitimate cocaine stirred a massive boom among scientists and medical men, consumers and enthusiasts of many likes, and international traders and manufacturers, including some of the world’s leading pharmaceutical firms. Yet almost as rapidly, from 1900 to the 1920s, this early medical and commercial fascination with cocaine collapsed, its prestige replaced step by step until the 1960s by the global prohibitionist regimes and
From the beginning, the anti-cocaine coalition demonstrated a dual set of motives. A primary concern for minimizing the harms generated by widespread availability of cocaine reflected the first set of motives. Groups whose central focus was the reduction of cocaine abuse encompassed the fields of public health, child welfare, social work, and temperance – a list which only begins to suggest the diversity of the reform movement. The second set of interests was shared by those whose primary interest was establishing a basic system of drug regulation. For such groups, cocaine was but one example – albeit a very powerful one – of the need to control the pharmaceutical industry. Organizations such as the American Medical Association claimed the cocaine experience demonstrated that commercial interests, left uncontrolled, would always win out over “medical science” and public
At treatment entry, these individuals are often in acute distress, expressing feelings of hopelessness, dysphoria, and agitation. However, such negative affect may be relatively short-lived, returning to baseline within a few days or weeks. As such, self-report estimates of affective and anxiety disorders during the entry stages of treatment are inherently unreliable. In contrast, however, a convergence of psychometric evidence reveals a striking prevalence of Axis II pathology in this population, as well as a neuropsychological profile of cognitive and intellectual deficits suggestive of a moderate frontal dyscontrol syndrome (which may or may not be