Vin Mariani

In his column on whether the Civil War created 500,000 morphine addicts, CA says:
“Some raised the alarm about morphine addiction as the 19th century drew to a close, but often the solution was substituting some other drug. In 1884 Sigmund Freud recommended cocaine as a means of treating morphine and alcohol addiction. He
also wrote glowingly of coke’s value as a mental stimulant and aphrodisiac, views that were still being floated nearly a century
later. “Vin Mariani,” a mixture of cocaine and wine introduced in 1865, became a popular cure-all…”
I would just like to point out that this cocaine-alcohol mixture was endorsed, for a time, by the Pope! Perhaps this is why the present Pope sticks to playing his guitar on cassettes and CDs and doesn’t do celebrity endorsements!
Fortunately the Pope’s infallability seems to be restricted to matters of faith and only then when speaking “ex cathedra”, otherwise the Roman Catholic Church might be a bunch of cokeheads today.
I hope Lyndon B. Larouche doesn’t hear of this. He once accused the British Royal Family of being drug-dealers, possibly because of British connections with the Opium Trade in the XIXth century, or possibly just because. The Pope could be next.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/990709.html