Drug Types 17eating and exercise habits. A comparison study^10 not only found behavioral
therapy superior to anorectic therapy in preventing regain of lost pounds but
also found behavioral therapy to be more effective alone than when using
anorectics along with it—a troubling result for advocates of anorectics. Skep-
tics ask whether drugs that produce only mild temporary improvement in a
chronic condition are worth anything.
For information about specific anorectic class stimulants, see alphabetical
listings for:benzphetamine,diethylpropion,fenfluramine,mazindol,phen-
dimetrazine,phenmetrazine,phentermine, andsibutramine.
Cocaine Class
As decades change, so do attitudes toward cocaine. In the latter 1800s it
was widely used by ordinary middle-class Americans and had a reputation
no worse thanalcoholor tobacco. In the years before World War I, news
media stories tied the drug to African Americans and crime, and public opin-
ion transformed the substance from a commonplace item into a substance used
mainly by social deviants. Cocaine received little attention from the 1960s
illicit drug culture, which seemingly considered cocaine an archaic item no
longer of interest. In the 1970s cocaine was portrayed as a drug used by
wealthy “beautiful people,” and in the 1980s it was portrayed as a poor ghetto
dweller’s drug. In the 1800s cocaine was considered highly addictive, but from
the 1950s into the 1980s it was described as nonaddictive. By the 1990s cocaine
was called the most addictive drug known, and demand for the product re-
sulted in accessibility likened to fast-food hamburgers. Although tolerance
develops with abuse of most stimulants and was reported with cocaine in the
1800s, in the 1970s and 1980s a scientific consensus held that tolerance did not
develop among cocaine abusers. On the contrary, abuse was believed to sen-
sitize people taking the drug, allowing them to achieve the same effects with
smaller and smaller doses. Yet by the 1990s cocaine addicts were believed to
have a compulsive desire to take more and more of the drug. They were seen
to engage in the same kind of binge habit exhibited by amphetamine abusers.
Although a chemical formula stays unaltered as decades pass, ways of using
a substance can change. Long ago cocaine was used to make mildly stimulat-
ing drinks. Velo-Coca and Vin Mariani were popular cocaine beverages of the
nineteenth century, the latter endorsed by notables such as Thomas Edison,
Jules Verne, and Pope Leo XIII. The soft drink Coca-Cola originally contained
cocaine, but the drug was dropped from the soda early in the twentieth cen-
tury. These old beverages, however, had about the same relation to cocaine
as beer has to white lightning moonshine. A pint of beer and a pint of white
lightning may both contain alcohol, but their impact on a user will likely
differ. Compared to full-strength pharmaceutical cocaine, old cocaine bever-
ages were relatively weak concoctions.
Some notables are famed for their use of the full-strength product, the most
famous example being that of the pioneering psychiatrist Sigmund Freud.
When he no longer found the drug useful, he tapered off and eventually quit
with no particular difficulty. His example has been duplicated by many other
users. He and they were persons enjoying lives of fulfillment in which cocaine