Medicines, sometimes

Usage examples of drugs.

Way back before the drug lords and the cartels, before Bush and Panama and the War on Drugs, Noriega, Reagan and the Contra scandal, crack and John Belushi.

Stronger drugs, such as the opiates, force the release of vast amounts of dopamine, flooding the pleasure centres in the brain - leading to intense euphoria.

All drugs had side effects, and cocaine was liable to fluctuations in strength, making dosage calculations haphazard, so this was not too surprising, but there was a much more serious problem - as Freud was soon to realise when he watched the drug take over the life of a great friend of his, Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow.

What even he did not realise was that Fleischl-Marxow was not only taking cocaine now: he was back on the morphine as well, injecting colossal doses of both drugs simultaneously.

In the late nineteenth century little was understood about the action of drugs on the body.

He then explained that Freud experts tended to be cagey because they are polarised between those who think Freud is unassailably great and those who think he took way too much drugs for his own good.

A PhD thesis from theUniversityofMichiganin 1968 recorded the results of a student who had spent three years feeding commonly abused drugs to rats in the laboratory and monitoring their sexual antics.

This is not entirely surprising bearing in mind he has spent the best part of forty years taking drugs professionally.

From 1902 onwards, he worked on an act that would not ban drugs per se, but would force patent cure manufacturers to list the ingredients of their medicines on the bottle.

South - vague, but always insistent rumors that the addiction to such drugs as morphine and cocaine was becoming a veritable curse to the colored race in certain regions.

Such prejudiced and frankly Neanderthal attitudes towards the problem of drug abuse ensure that the fight against drugs and drug-based crime will never be won.

To some extent the same prejudices can be seen today, linking drugs and disease, drugs and crime, drugs and sex, drugs and violence and, ultimately, drugs and black people.

As I was to discover again and again in the course of my research for this book, drugs are as much of a race issue today as they were a century ago.

Over 50 per cent of all American crime over the last 75 years has been blamed on drugs, because drugs are the single most convenient scapegoat for a society that is unable to blame itself.

When it comes to explaining the presence of those drugs themselves, blame is still not placed on American consumers, but on the foreign suppliers who grow the stuff.