A 1902 article titled “Negro Cocaine Fiends” in the medical weekly Medical News claimed that cocaine made Black people stronger, increased our endurance, and made us “impervious to the extremes of heat and cold.” Cocaine began replacing coffee and whiskey anywhere hard labor and grueling conditions existed—on docks and levee construction sites along the Mississippi, in mines in the West, on plantations and railroad construction camps throughout the South. “Use of the drug among negroes is growing to an alarming extent,” The Atlanta Constitution reported in 1901. It was this association with
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