[Dragées bengué with cocaine. Historic review of legislation concerning cocaine].

The Bengué sugar-coated pills with menthol and cocaine, followed by the "B.M.C. pills" (with borax, methanol and cocaine) were delivered freely at the chemist's shop. The fact that nobody seemed shocked by the free delivery of this dope does not result only from the circumstance that it was allowed by law, but also because, in our countries, in the XIXth century, there were as good as no cases of cocaine mania. Owing to personal experiments, it became known in wide social circles that cocaine was not only an anesthetic and pain-killing remedy, but also an intoxicating drug that can quickly lead to addiction. Physicians began to search for means of eliminating the plague of addiction: a first International Opium-meeting was held in Shanghai in 1909. After that time, international meetings were held in The Hague (1912) and Geneva (1924 and 1925). Strangely enough, we find that in the promulgated laws an exception is made for pharmaceutical products which contain less than 0.2% morphine or less than 0.1% cocaine. When the medical world began to devote more attention to the danger of cocaine mania, the pharmaceutical and the chemical world became alarmed. A synthetic substitute was searched for and found; it should be less toxic and less addicting. The producers of the BMC pills eagerly adopted the new drugs. They replaced cocaine by amylocaine. The name of the pills was changed into BMA pills (borax-menthol-amylocaine). The coat of the pills remained the same and not one single patient ever noticed the substitution!