I recently read this article while I was perusing one of my favorite blogs - PharmaGossip. I happen to be in the Pharmaceutical industry and am always blown away by such articles. I have a sister who studies Psychology so I'm a little familiar with Freud's crazy experimentation with Cocaine, but this article really gives you an insight of the experimentation and it also links to another article which gives an in depth explanation of Freud's report on Cocaine - Uber Coca where in he claims "I take very small doses of it regularly," he said, "against depression and indigestion". Great, so if your feeling down and can't take a shit, do a fat line, and you can kill two birds with one snort. You've got to love drug abuse in the name of science. I can't even imagine how it would be today if you told someone - "In the name of science I'm blowing a few rails, and then I'll write about in my journal". Shit! Sign me up for that Clinical Trial!
However, the most interesting thing about this article is when I learned that at some point the pharmaceutical companies Merck and Parkie Davis eventually started paying Freud to promote their brands of cocaine to be used for things such as toothache drops for children (now let's see them complain about the dentist!). The sad truth is that times have not really changed. We live in a world where much of the medicine we "discover" we're not even sure how or why it works, we just know it yields certain results.
I guess we live in a day and age where it doesn't really matter why things work, just as long as they work. If I was wrong, the sales of Viagra wouldn't be where they are today.
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