Hamilton Wright, a physician and pathologist who served in the State Department as United States Opium Commissioner under President Theodore Roosevelt, wrote in a 1910 report, “It has been authoritatively stated that cocaine is often the direct incentive to the crime of rape by the Negroes of the South and other sections of the country.” In a 1914 congressional hearing on drugs, Christopher Koch, a physician serving on the State Pharmacy Board of Pennsylvania, echoed that judgment. “Most of the attacks upon the white women of the South are the direct result of a cocaine-crazed Negro brain,”
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