1. What class of drug is cocaine?
Cocaine is in the stimulant/amphetamine class of drugs

2. People have been chewing the leaves of the coca plant for centuries with no ill effects, but cocaine is a relatively recent discovery. How was cocaine discovered?
Cocaine was discovered from a coca leaf which people chewed on to get a boost of energy, in South America. It came about as a cure for almost all illnesses in the late 19th century; an Italian doctor in 1850 discovered the secrets of the coca leaf and the chemicals it contained. In Germany, a pharmaceutical company where the ancient beliefs about the coca leafs collided with modern chemistry in 1860 when Albert Neiman research the leaf and found and isolated the drugs chemical active ingredient which was a crystalline substance. He named this, cocaine.

3. How and when was cocaine first introduced into the United States?
Cocaine was first introduced to the United States in 1863 in a wine called Mariani; there was an unknown ingredient in this wine… cocaine.

4. What motivated the first laws banning the use of cocaine in the United States?
What motivated the first laws banning the use of cocaine in the U.S. was a panic that came about when people believed that cocaine was the cause of African Americans violence towards whites, at the time when there was much racial hatred. There was talk about scandalous sex and rape that came from cocaine users whom were black and raping white women. The fact that cocaine was thought to be used by black men to seduce white women was the final straw. They first banned the use of all drugs to uncivilized races. Southern states were the first states to ban cocaine but there were still no federal law against the use of drugs in the United States. The first federal ban to stem the cocaine epidemic in the U.S. came from an opium epidemic in China; this causes the U.S to inspire an international treaty to ban opium trade worldwide. This was the opportunity the world needed to institute a national drug law without having to enact a constitutional amendment.

5. The first national drug law in the United States did not make drugs illegal. What did the Harrison act do?
The first national drug law that was embodied in the Harrison Tax Act of 1914 which put a tax on anyone who had the drug and it required that pharmacists, importers, doctors, distributors to keep records of all of it. This law made cocaine illegal. If the users were a licensed