COCAINISM. — An irresistible tendency to take cocaine for sensual pleasure, either by injection or, more commonly, by sniffing the powder through the nose. Among the most serious forms of intoxication, it is a vice quite common in large cities, particularly on the fringes of prostitution. The immediate motive, based on a congenital weakness of the will and an abnormal tendency to abuse stimulants, is represented by the desire to avoid physical pain, or the search for oblivion from sorrows, or the craving for sensual pleasure, stimulated by the hope of aphrodisiac effects or of strange and new sensations.
Cocaine, due to its dual property—narcotic and intoxicating (the essential one)—induces in the subject a state of vague well-being, of intoxication with sensory hallucinations in which images from the subconscious, particularly those of an erotic nature, are composed into a kind of pleasant transient madness, sustained by the state of narcosis that anesthetizes and silences any unpleasant physical or moral sensation that may exist.
Chronic use leads to progressive and severe physical (up to cachexia) and mental deterioration, with disturbances of sensitivity, alterations in motility (weakness, convulsions), decline in intelligence, in affective tone (hypochondria), and in the will.
II. MORAL DOCTRINE
The use of cocaine, like that of any other narcotic or intoxicant, is in itself lawful when resorted to rarely and for a legitimate reason (e.g., to dull pain, to excite or facilitate sleep in those suffering from insomnia). But the use becomes gravely illicit when the drug is resorted to either for improper motives or with excessive frequency and almost habitually, both because of the serious harm—already mentioned—to physical and mental life, and because it easily exposes one to the danger of an unrestrained and difficult-to-control desire for the drug, with its attendant deplorable consequences.NARCOTICS.