“I need a lot of cocaine…”
Sigmund Freud is a character. It’s hard to find someone else who occupies the space in our culture that he does. Highly influential, incredibly wrong, amusingly absurd.
Freud loved coke. He tried treating his friend’s morphine addiction with it, who unsurprisingly said taking coke allowed him to take less morphine. His first major scientific publication was “Uber Coca”, which translates to “On Cocaine”, which begs us to ask whether he was on cocaine when he wrote On cocaine. The answer seems to be yes.
Freud recommended that cocaine be considered for treating digestive disorders, asthma, loss of sexual potency, melancholy, hysteria, and morphine addiction. This was met with strong condemnation from the German medical community. Also, his friend was now addicted to both coke and morphone.
To quote Freud, “I need a lot of cocaine… The torment, most of the time, is superhuman”