Europeans Were Using Cocaine in the 17th Century—Hundreds of Years Earlier Than Historians Thought

Researchers have identified traces of cocaine in the brain tissue of two people buried in Italy in the 1600s. The discovery challenges longstanding assumptions about the drug, which was thought to have spread through Europe in the 19th century.

The human remains were found in the crypt of Milan’s Ca’ Granda hospital, where poor patients were buried en masse throughout the 17th century, according to a new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

The crypt’s 14 underground chambers contain approximately 2.9 million bones belonging to more than 10,000 people who died in the hospital. Lead author Gaia Giordano, a scientist at the University of Milan, tells the New York Times’ Alexander Nazaryan that she was overwhelmed by the crypt’s contents: “You see a floor of bone, full of bones.”

The researchers analyzed samples of brain tissue from nine individuals found in the crypt, hoping to learn about the “toxicological habits of the Milanese population” in the 1600s. They found traces of cocaine in two of the samples, including benzoylecgonine (a metabolite the liver produces in response to cocaine) and hygrine (a compound found in coca leaves).

One of the samples belonged to a man with syphilis between the ages of 30 and 45. The second individual’s age and sex are still unknown. Per the study, the coca plant was not listed in the hospital’s medication records, which suggests that these two people chewed it of their own accord, perhaps for recreation.

The coca plant is native to South America, where Indigenous groups have been consuming coca leaves for millennia. They lauded the plant for its ability to relieve pain, boost energy and foster an altered state during religious rituals.

The Spanish learned about the drug when they infiltrated South America. Popular Mechanics’ Darren Orf points to Pedro Cieza de León, a 16th-century Spanish conquistador who noticed that the Indigenous peoples in Peru’s Andes Mountains regularly sucked on coca leaves. “It kept them from feeling hungry, giving them great vigor and strength,” he wrote.

Christine VanPool, an anthropologist at the University of Missouri, thinks the Spanish would have been attracted to the coca plant’s medicinal qualities. “I could imagine [a] scenario where someone got it through just being really sick and seeking help,” she tells the Times. Then, that person may have realized, “Wow, that’s good medicine.” The coca plant may have then been brought back to Milan, which was an important trading hub.

The Spanish botanist Nicolás Monardes wrote about his studies of the coca leaf in the mid-1500s. But it wasn’t until the mid-1800s that the German chemist Albert Niemann got to work on a box of coca plants sent to his laboratory. He isolated the coca leaf’s active ingredient, which he named “cocaine.”

In the years that followed, cocaine became a widely accepted medicine in the Western world, regularly administered for ailments and used as a local anesthetic for surgeries. In fact, cocaine was an ingredient in early versions of Coca-Cola, which is named for the coca leaf and the kola nut (a source of caffeine). While the drug’s rise and eventual fall are well-documented, the new study sheds light on a lesser-known chapter of cocaine’s history.

Still, many questions remain. How did the two patients at Ca’ Granda acquire cocaine? If poorer groups were able to access the plant, it was likely “available on the open market, which is something that probably took a few years,” Mario Zimmermann, an archaeologist at Boise State University, tells New Scientist’s Sophie Berdugo. “The interesting matter now at hand is how far it reached out, and how many people.”

Sonja Anderson | READ MORE

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in New York City.