
Cocaine
Cocaine was legal until the 1920s and many famous people, from Thomas Edison to Sigmund Freud, were addicted. After Freud sent some powder to his friend, Carl Koller, the Viennese surgeon licked it off his finger and noticed his tongue became numb. He experimented with it in the lab and on animals and eventually used it as a local anesthetic during an eye operation in 1884. The ‘medicine’ was widely used by surgeons and dentists for decades.
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