I don't know if cocaine was actually around in the 1800s. See the advert purportedly dating from Victorian times, recommending cocaine as remedy for toothache. I am not surprised to see it for sale at a price of 15 cents. It might have been 24, or 33 cents. I expect to find number 6 somewhere.It's a fake sign. Retro style signage is popular for telling jokes. The sign is not real.
We are told that famous psychologist, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), wrote about taking it himself, and prescribing it to his patients. Maybe it's long been in use by a small section of society, maybe it was taken by people with chronic toothache over 100 years ago.
Fast forward to the 1970s, and in a short few years, cocaine is on the streets and big business. And expensive, so you need to have a steady supply of money to maintain the habit.
TV, Movies, and News Outlets help sell the narrative. Yachts, sun-glasses, beautiful girls, loads of money, guns, daring and danger. Yachts pop up a lot. Drug busts on yachts. You need to be reminded that cocaine sometimes needs to be transported over water. The people who run the cocaine empire want you to believe that it's origin is Columbia, and to deliver it to other continents, sometimes requires a boat.
You look at Colombia on the map, and think, yes, that makes sense. It only makes sense if you think coca leaves are the vital ingredient in cocaine. That does not make sense, but that is what they want you to believe. It is a narrative to make you believe there something natural about it.
People will always try to deceive you. This is flour.
I've never eaten Colombian coca leaves, maybe they do make you feel energised and cause some numbness. But you could create that effect with Redbull and painkillers. So coca leaves cannot be said to be a vital ingredient for the production of cocaine. This is borne out by the synthetic imitations that are on the black market today, what might be called bath salts. Powders reportedly producing the same effects as what is called cocaine. They look the same, you couldn't tell the difference. Cocaine is made in a laboratory, and it can be made in any country in the world.
If cocaine is made in Colombia, there will be no coca leaves involved. We have phony documentaries and contrived news reports telling us cocaine is being made in the jungle, by people wearing bandanas on their faces, cooking coca leaves in a big pot and adding cement to the mix. And we are to believe that the problem of cocaine can be solved by destroying crops. That is a ruse, a fake narrative to make people believe there is something natural about it. Cocaine is synthetic, it's chemicals, and people might think twice about trying it out if they understood that. Chances are it was made in the country in which it was bought. The coca leaf is a red herring.