17th Century Italians Like To Do A Line Too!

The New Scientist

The mummified brain tissue of two people found in a 17^th-century crypt in Milan, Italy, contains traces of cocaine, revealing that the drug was being used in Europe 200 years earlier than previously recorded.

Coca leaves, from which cocaine is derived, have been chewed in the plant’s native South America for thousands of years, but the drug only took off in Europe in the 19^th century, when it was chemically isolated from the plant.

Spanish conquerors learned of the psychoactive and therapeutic properties of coca leaves, but restricted the spread of this knowledge to keep it within the Spanish Empire. In the 16^th century they made some effort to export the plant, but it didn’t transport well – or so we thought.

Now, Gaia Giordano at the University of Milan and her colleagues are rewriting that story. They looked at nine people who died sometime in the 1600s and were buried in a well-preserved crypt belonging to the former Ca’ Granda hospital, which historically treated the city’s poor. The team took tiny samples of brain tissue from each individual and analysed their chemical composition to learn what kind of drugs were being used at the time

Read the full article

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2444473-cocaine-in-mummified-brains-reveals-when-europeans-first-used-the-drug/