COCAINISM. - Irresistible tendency to take cocaine for pleasure, by injection or, more often, sniffed in powder form through the nose; among the most serious forms of intoxication, it is a vice quite frequent in large cities, particularly on the fringes of prostitution. The proximate motive, on the basis of a congenital weakness of the will and an anomalous tendency to abuse stimulating substances, is represented by the desire to avoid physical pain or by the search for oblivion from sorrows or by the craving for pleasure, spurred by the hope of aphrodisiac effects, of strange and new sensations.
Cocaine, because of its twofold property, narcotic and stupefying (the essential one), develops in the subject a state of vague well-being, of intoxication with sensory hallucinations in which the images of the subconscious, particularly those with erotic content, combine into a kind of pleasant transitory madness, sustained by the state of narcosis that anesthetizes and silences every unpleasant physical and moral sensation that may exist.
The chronic nature of the use gives rise to progressive serious physical decline (to the point of cachexia) and mental decline with disturbances of sensitivity, alterations of motility (weakening, convulsions), deterioration of intelligence, of affective tone (hypochondria), of the will.
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Giuseppe de Ninno
II. MORAL DOCTRINE
The use of cocaine, like that of any other narcotic or stupefacient, is in itself lawful, when it is resorted to rarely and for a legitimate reason (e.g., to dull a pain, to induce or facilitate sleep in someone suffering from insomnia). But the use becomes gravely unlawful when the drug is resorted to either for motives that are not upright or with excessive frequency and almost as a matter of course, both because of the grave harms, mentioned above, to physical and psychic life, and because it easily exposes one to the danger of an unbridled and hardly controllable craving for the drug, with the related deplorable consequences. v. STUPEFACENTI.
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