Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Cocaine is the second most popular illegal recreational drug in Europe (behind cannabis). Since the mid-1990s, overall cocaine usage in Europe has been on the rise, but usage rates and attitudes tend to vary between countries. European countries with the highest usage rates are the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, and the Republic of Ireland.
The Ebers Papyrus – one of the most important medical papyri of ancient Egypt – was written around 1550 BCE, and covers more than 700 drugs, mainly of plant origin. [7] The first references to pills were found on papyri in ancient Egypt, and contained bread dough, honey, or grease.
The cocaine boom was a stark increase in the illegal production and trade of the drug cocaine that first began in the mid to late 1970s before then peaking during the 1980s. The boom was the result of organized smugglers who imported cocaine from Latin America to the United States, and a rising demand in cocaine due to cultural trends in the ...
Recent busts underscore a reality that European drug authorities have been warning about: More cocaine than ever is pouring into the continent, where South American chemists, traffickers and local ...
The World Drug Report stated, “The cocaine found in Africa originated mainly in Colombia and Peru and frequently transited through Brazil”. Heroin often travels through Southeast Asian regions, such as the Golden Triangle region of northern Thailand, and through Western Asian countries through a mix of overland routes and air transport by ...
Coca leaf is the raw material for the manufacture of the drug cocaine, a powerful stimulant and anaesthetic extracted chemically from large quantities of coca leaves. Today, since it has mostly been replaced as a medical anaesthetic by synthetic analogues such as procaine, cocaine is best known as an illegal recreational drug.
The legal status of cocaine varies worldwide. Even though many countries have banned the sale of cocaine for recreational use, some have legalized it for possession, personal use, transportation, and cultivation, while some have decriminalized it for certain uses. It is necessary to distinguish cocaine from coca leaves or the plant itself.
Niemann isolated cocaine from coca leaves in 1859. In the 19th century, there was great interest among European chemists in the effects of coca leaves discovered in Latin America . In 1855 the chemist Friedrich Gaedcke had published a treatise on an active alkaloid extract of the coca leaf he called erythroxyline , after the genus Erythroxylum ...