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Fun fact: cocaine is technically legal in the United States for medicinal and, apparently, research purposes. There is a single US company licensed to import coca leaves: the Stepan Company, which extracts extremely pure cocaine from the coca leaves, sells the spent leaves to the Coca-Cola Company (which uses them as an ingredient) and the cocaine to Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals, which is presumably where UC Berkeley sourced the cocaine for this experiment.



Cocaine is semi-routinely used for dental and sinus surgery in Australia. My mother had cocaine used in her sinus surgery only 8 years ago.


They probably sourced it from Sigma Aldrich, although I'm not sure who Sigma uses as a supplier.




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