Editors ’ view

In the Journal this month we publish a short themed section on cocaine-associated cardiac dysrhythmias [1–3]. Cocaine is a weak base extracted from the South American plant Erythroxylon coca. Leaves of this plant have been chewed by Amerindian peoples for thousands of years, making it one of the most venerable of ‘lifestyle drugs ’ [4], and its numbing effect on the tongue and buccal mucosa was known before Christopher Colombus’s voyage of 1492.The alkaloid was first isolated and proposed as a local anaesthetic in 1860. Sigmund Freud tried (unsuccessfully) to harness its ‘psychic energizing ’ properties for therapeu-tic use, but also gave a sample to a Viennese ophthalmolo-gist friend, Karl Köller, who reported on the use of cocaine eye drops as a local anaesthetic in 1884. This was rapidly adopted and the use of cocaine was soon extended t