African Traditional Herbal Research Clinic ... - Blackherbals.com

Continued from page 12 – Freud and CocaineThere was still moderate bleeding from the nose andmouth; the fetid odour was very bad. [The doctor]suddenly pulled at something like a thread, kept onpulling. Before either of us had time to think, at leasthalf a meter of gauze had been removed from thecavity. The next came a flood of blood. The patientturned white, her eyes bulged, and she had no pulse...Atthe moment the foreign body came out and everythingbecame clear to me...I felt sick. After she had beenpacked, I fled to the next room, drank a bottle of water,and felt miserable...It was the beginning of the end of the great affair.The final cutIt's difficult to ascertain exactly when Freud gave uphis coke habit. We know he was using in the late 1890sand by 1904 had stopped completely. So whathappened in between?By 1900 the friendship was becoming strained -- Freudwas on the brink of success with psychoanalysis, whileFleiss was becoming moment increasingly grandiose inhis theories, which largely centered around the idea of amale and female sexual cycle, and finally that manyillnesses could be attributed to left and righthandedness. But this is only part of the story.Freud behaved like a petulant lover, overly sensitive,and prone to fits of depression if Fleiss didn't respondto his communications immediately. In one letter hewrote:There has never been a six-month period in which I soconstantly and ardently longed to be living in the sameplace as you. [11]A few months later Freud's jealousy had all butdestroyed the friendship. They met for the last time.Freud was cold and cross. He slandered ideas andtheories that he had once rapturously congratulatedFleiss for. Typically, Fleiss put it down to envy. Wethink it was more likely to be the absence of the happyjuice.Needless to say, Fleiss became a footnote in the life ofFreud, whose own ideas went on to be celebratedacross the globe. Although they're now largelydismissed, there's no doubt that they were groundbreaking, and deservedly earned him the moniker of"the father of psychoanalysis". We wonder if he wouldhave had them at all if half of Columbia hadn'tdisappeared up his nose in his formative years.Footnotes1. We can only speculate as to how twentieth centuryhistory would be different if the Germans had dis-covered marijuana instead of cocaine.2. Extract from a letter to Martha, 2 June 1884. Breger p.673. Someone should tell Ian.4. Even though cocaine didn't hit the street as medicine until the1880s, people had been using it recreationally for some time.When the cocaine business went south (geographically aswell as metaphorically), Coke pulled the cocaine out of theformula.5. Although they still use coca leaves today to flavour the drink.In fact, they own a pharmaceutical company called StepanChemicals in Chicago, whose primary purpose is to take thecocaine out of the coca.6. This is quite possibly how our faithful readers feel at timesabout History House stories.7. Breger, p129.8. And iridologists think your eyes tell your illnesses, andreflexologists think the answers to your problems are in yourfeet. Need we go on?9. Picture the two men, high as kites staring gravely up eachothers nostrils and you've got it.10. Streatfield, p.11211. Breger, p.150Bibliography1. Louis Breger. Freud: darkness in the midst of vision. JohnWiley & Sons, 2000.2. Dominic Streatfeild. Cocaine: An unauthorized biography.Dunne Books, June 2002. This book rocks, we highlyrecommend it.3. Robert Sabbag. Snowblind: A Brief Career in the CocaineTrade. MacMillan Publishing Company, December 1976.4. Edward M. Brecher and the editors of Consumer Reports.Licit and Illicit Drugs: The Consumers Union Report onNarcotics, Stimulants, Depressants, Inhalants, Hallucinogens,and Marijuana - Including Caffeine, Nicotine, and Alcohol.Little, Brown and Co., 1972. [Out of Print]http://www.historyhouse.com/in_history/cocaine/☻☻☻☻☻☻Continued from page 3 – Drugs and the Subcon--sciousreason for the craving may seem vague. Sometimes thedrug use is accompanied by other destructive or evencriminal behavior which may not be remembered later. Wecan refer to this as the J & H Syndrome - Jekyll and Hyde.13. Drug dependent individuals often display a strangeethic based upon the idea that dysfunctional behavioroccurring in the drug state somehow more clearly reflectsthe true person. Such individuals will suggest that oneshould not quit getting high or "blame the drug" because ifthe tendency toward destructive behavior were not "there inthe first place" the drug could never bring it out. The factthat the behavior has never occured when the person isstraight doesn't even seem to matter. The drug is seen as a"reality trip." This leads the user to believe that he is more"tuned in" than non users.Continued on page 51-13- Traditional African Clinic December 2009