Addiction I: A Familiar Evil in Cocaine
By 1886, Freud was conducting damage control for his endorsement of cocaine as a wonder drug, as cocaine addiction became more widely recognized in the medical world. A colleague of Freud, Dr. A. Erlenmeyer, declared that Freud had popularized the “third scourge of mankind,” alongside morphine and alcohol (Markel, 2011). In 1887, Freud penned a rebuttal stating that the only persons prone to cocaine addiction were morphine addicts whose cravings predestined them to substance abuse of one kind or another. Very soon, however, observation did not bear this out, and Freud disavowed his cocaine research later in life. Psychopharmacology then had to address the growing problem of addiction, particularly among working class patients. In Europe, this took the form of detaining patients for 5-7 days and administering decreasing doses of the drug in question, which in effect weaned them off it in a short period of time. While patients might leave better than how they entered, wards at this time lacked the ability to accurately measure recidivism, which handicapped doctors’ ability to judge the efficacy of this treatment (Carlson and Simpson, 1963).
