Conclusion
Cocaine’s era as an experimental drug with boundless possibilities was short lived. The psychological effects of cocaine on habitual users would continue to garner interest until the 1940s. Its early history in the medical establishment would shape psychopharmacology for decades to come. Some of the first clinical trials with LSD in the 1950s were to adminster the substance as a cure for alcoholism, to which end researchers expereinced more success than cocaine's effect on morphine addiction (Giffort, 2020).
Cocaine would experience a renaissance in the 1970s and 1980s, when use would resume popularity with white, middle-class society in the U.S., only recreation rather than pharmaceutical. This precipitous fall from grace from wonder drug to street drug inspired a wave of early twentieth-century legislation in the U.S. and Europe to regulate addictive substances and protect consumers from untested drugs. Before access was legally barred, cocaine ushered in a new era of psychoactive drug research that would become prevalent in the second half of the twentieth century and continues to this day.
