I was going to say this is pedantically correct, but on closer inspection, it's not even that. Cocaine, the chemical, is present in both coca leaves and cocaine, the drug. When people say cocaine--particularly in this context--they're referring to cocaine the drug, not cocaine the chemical.
Cocaine the drug and cocaine the chemical are homonyms, and it's incorrect--fully technically--to confuse their use.
Banks, the financial institutions, are not transformed into banks, exposed riverbeds, when they're proximate to water. Cocaine, the drug, and cocaine, the chemical, are simply homonyms. Claiming the Inca did cocaine is a dad joke, not serious argument.
And that if we interpret the sentence like that (which we should if that's how it's generally understood) then it is not true that people were doing cocaine in the 17th century.
Furthermore, the most purified form of drinking ethanol actually is called “grain alcohol”; Everclear is a popular brand.
Yes. This is true colloquially and legally.
When people eat poppyseed bagels they don't say they're doing codeine or morphine.
It's generally understood that "smoking weed" is likely to be a different experience than "taking THC"
When it comes to coffee, people are generally aware that caffeine is the active ingredient. If you ask someone, “have you had any caffeine today?”, they’re not going to say “no” if they’ve had six cups of coffee. They’re going to say, “yes, I’ve had six cups of coffee”. They’re not going to try and pick a tedious argument that they didn’t really have caffeine because they drank coffee instead of snorting crushed up caffeine pills.
Nope. Cocaine, the drug, is a cocaine salt. Commonly cocaine hydrochloride, but Wikipedia seems convinced it's also neutralised into sulfates and nitrates. Crack contains cocaine, the chemical, but is not cocaine, the drug.
That is, it sounds like you're trying to bend over backwards to invent a coherent meaning to impose on the utterances of people who are just confused and ignorant, with the result that your own utterances are losing meaning. The reason people say things like "crack isn't cocaine, the drug" and "coca leaves don't contain cocaine" isn't that their utterances refer to some coherent entity called "cocaine, the drug", which consists of some arbitrary collection of cocaine salts but excludes the hydroxide. They're just wrong, because being wrong is a thing that people do a lot, especially when they're talking about things they don't know about, like chemistry.
Yes. So does the DEA. We had separate charges for “cocaine” and “crack” for decades, with the former referring to the powdered salt and the latter to the base. The fact that the active compound is identical is irrelevant.
> They're just wrong, because being wrong is a thing that people do a lot, especially when they're talking about things they don't know about, like chemistry
We’re talking about language. Not chemistry per se.
Someone saying someone doing crack is doing cocaine is simply incorrect in a colloquial context. Sort of like how tomatoes are culinarily a vegetable even if botanically they are fruits.
Crack is "crack cocaine". It is a Form of cocaine.
The separation of "cocaine" and "crack" was a policy and marketing choice, in order to make it possible that a black person would get 20 years for dealing the same drug that would only get a white person 5 years.
The people chewing coca leaves before the 1800s were doing so in order to consume the cocaine within.
Cocaine makes me feel like a new man. And he wants some too!
Someone saying that doing crack is doing cocaine is simply correct in a colloquial context. If the DEA says they are incorrect, they are simply bullshitting due to political incentives.
Does the molecule C17H21NO4 exist in both the raw, dried leaves of the coca plant, and a powdered, refined extract from the same plant?
What's also humorous to me is this entire discussion is centered around vernacular usage of a word versus the scientific definition. Cocaine is cocaine, but "cocaine" means different things to some people and not to others.
You would be expected to read it this way because the article explicitly elaborates on how cocaine hydrochloride is isolated from leaves (that alone should have stopped you from trying to "inform" anyone), and uses that to drive the main thesis about the industrialization and democratization of drugs.
And that's an entirely self-contained pathway to the correct reading, nevermind what you already knew going into the exercise.
The caffeine analogy is useless because there is no common sense of people using caffeine to very different effect the way there is for cocaïne.
It's derived from RTFA, "read the fucking article."
It gives the wrong idea to say these 17th century people were doing cocaïne.