Drugs vs. Herbs and the problem of Freud's Cocaine Addiction

Re: Sigmund Freud's addiction to cocaine: The problem with isolating an "effective" or "active" ingredient out of an herb, is you increase the actual dose, and lose all the buffers, not to mention in the case of Coca leaf, the cultural context. The result is an infinitely greater propensity to undesirable effects, a.k.a., the cure worse than the disease, since side effects are a function of, among other factors, dose and lack of buffers.

Now the question also arises, what of Freud's cocaine-fueled private obsessions entered into his theories. His brilliant work on the role of the unconscious in motivation not withstanding.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/books/review/an-anatomy-of-addiction-by-howard-markel-book-review.htm

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