Useless Drug Facts
In the Andes Mountains of Peru, where porters can work with superhuman endurance for days with little or no food by chewing the leaves of the coca plant (from which cocaine is extracted), distances are measured in cocadas rather than miles. A cocada is the span of road that can be traveled after chewing one portion of coca leaves.
In 1865 opium was grown in the state of Virginia and a product was distilled from it that yielded 4 percent morphine. In 1867 it was grown in Tennessee; six years later it was cultivated in Kentucky. During these years opium, marijuana, and cocaine could be purchased legally over the counter from any druggist.
The drug thiopentone can kill a human being in one second if injected directly into the blood.
Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew Canabis sativa (marijuana) on their plantations.
In sixteenth-century Europe, many druggists sold medicine made from the powder of Egyptian mummies. Such “medicine” was considered good for gout and catarrh and was often incorporated into products known as “mummy balm” or “Egyptian salve”. In 1564 someone named Guy de la Fontaine attempted to corner the mummy market in Alexandria, a center for the export of such commodities. He discovered that Alexandrian merchants had for some time been selling the mummified remains of derelicts who had died not so long before from a variety of rather loathsome diseases.