Paolo Mantegazza
( 1831 - 1910 )

Paolo Mantegazza

Pioneering Italian psychopharmacologist Paolo Mantegazza wrote Sulle virtù igieniche e medicinali della coca e sugli alimenti nervosi in generale ("On the hygienic and medicinal properties of coca and on nervine nourishment in general") in 1858. Mantegazza's later 1200 page masterpiece, Quadri della natura umana. Feste ed ebbrezze ("Pictures of human nature. Feasts and inebriations"), was printed in Milan in 1871.

Mantegazza believed that psychopharmacology should be an experimental discipline. He found taking coca leaves was an illuminating experience:

"...I sneered at the poor mortals condemned to live in this valley of tears while I, carried on the wings of two leaves of coca, went flying through the spaces of 77, 438 words, each more splendid than the one before...An hour later, I was sufficiently calm to write these words in a steady hand: God is unjust because he made man incapable of sustaining the effect of coca all life long. I would rather have a life span of ten years with coca than one of 10 000 000..(and here I has inserted a line of zeros) centuries without coca."

Incas
Supercoke
Speedballs
Cocaine hotspots
Dopaminergic flies?
Dopaminergic agents
The coke-craving brain
Cocaine in North America
Colombia and the drug war
Sigmund Freud and cocaine
Buying Coke from Burger King

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