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Comment by pseingatl | Hacker News Reader

You can get a soft drink in Colombia or Bolivia containing non-decocainized coca leaves as ingredients today. The Stepan company in New Jersey is the only licensed importer of coca leaves in the US. They decocainize the leaves, removing the methyl benzoyl ecgonine (C17H21NO4) and then sell the remaining leaves to the Coca-Cola company for flavor.

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That begs the question what do they do with the methyl benzoyl ecgonine.

I suppose it ends up in lidocaine and other variants.

Cocaine is also a schedule 2 substance, meaning it is actually approved and sold for medical use. Not a lot, mind you, and mostly only in hospital settings for local anaesthesia purposes, but it was absolutely found in the catalogs we used to use for doing the ordering when I worked as a pharmacy technician.

They use it for tonsillectomies. It was the second entry on the itemized bill.

@anotheruser13 and @cykros. Thanks. I did not know that. This is why I love hackernews.

I think it's also used by dentists. I tried to find photos of the packaging at one point but couldn't find anything. I'm more than a little bit curious how the pharma packaging looks.

Local and global anesthesia use it often, actually even though you'd think it's the anesthesiologist that uses it (because they are known to be drug fiends) usually it's the surgeon who makes use of cocaine. I remember in my medical training that old surgeon Dr. Jackson, he'd have that thick moustache that'd always look like it'd been dragged through flour. But then he'd say "let me show you how to do surgery young paduans" and I'll be damned if he didn't perform 18 whipples, 13 trepinations, and 32 colonostomies in an hard-drivin' 48 hour continuous surgery jamboree

Wait seriously? I thought that wasnt a thing anymore.

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