This may take some serious research. A possible way to start is the search: "chemical exports" colombia cocaine , in firstgov.gov . This gets 12 hits, including a 2000 report, "Chemical Controls" put out by the State Department. They definitely are talking about controlling the export and import of chemicals used to extract and process various drugs. Potassium permanganate is mentioned in connection with cocaine, and under Bolivia, they say: "Bolivian lab operators are using inferior substitutes such as cement instead of lime, and sodium bicarbonate instead of ammonia, and they are recycling solvents such as ether."

Another of these 12 hits, "International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, 1998 Released by the Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, U.S. Department of State Washington, DC, February 1999" says: "Argentina has a well-developed chemical industry which produces all but two of the chemicals commonly used for the manufacture of cocaine. The exceptions are potassium permanganate and chloroform."

A more thorough search would be a patent search at www.uspto.gov . Click "Search" under "patents" in upper left corner. Click on "How to view page images" at bottom, to get to the TIFF viewer download at www.alternatiff.com (You can also go directly to this first. Alternatiff will ask for your name, address, phone, email, etc., the first time you install it on a machine. But they do not send spam - they just let you know when the tiff viewer gets updated.)

Next, further down the page, go to "Tools to help with searching by patent classification". That page has a VERY tiny "USPC Index" link on its tool bar in top center. Click on that, click "C" and use CTRL-F to find "Cocaine - 546/130" That means Class 546, subclass 130. Click the little red "P" at left to search the patent database back to 1790. CCL/546/130 gets 101 patents, and only the first 43 (back to 1976) have titles.

Kirk Othmer Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology mentioned cocaine as being refined back in the late 1800s, so I jumped to the end of the list of 101 patents, and clicked "images" to see the actual patent, 450887 issued April 21, 1891 to Carl Theodore Liebermann and Fritz Geisel of Brunswick, Ger.

You can also search the web for history of cocaine manufacture - to get closer to the actual "first patent or discovery", but be warned that even scholarly works are notoriously bad about omitting the patent NUMBER - which is the most critical thing to have in these huge patent databases. For example, Espacenet is the 55+ million European Patent Office database, and it has many German, Swiss, and a few other countries' patents far back into the 1800s. For many of them (including US patents,) you can't search even by International Class (IPC) more that a few decades back - you must have the patent number. But I used their European Classification (ECLA) search to find C07D451/06 for what seemed to be related to cocaine. Limiting to publication number: DE, I got 417 German patents. The last one in the list is DE47602, issued 14 Aug 1888, to Carl Liebermann and Fritz Geisel, in Braunschweig - the US450887 noted above is very related, if not the US equivalent. Its IPC code is C07D451/00. Combined with publication number: DE, that gets 541 patents, since IPC is a broader subject class than ECLA. Espacenet only will display 500 hits, and doesn't let you search year ranges. But if you add date: 0000, the search gets 44 German patents, from DE137622 (28 Nov 1901) back to that same DE47602 (Liebermann and Geisel 1888)

I hope this doesn't sound too intimidating - patent databases really are a treasure house of history. Please let me know if you want more information on searching them.

Jim Miller ("College Park PTDL" - Patent & Trademark Depository Library at University of Maryland) jmiller2 {at} umd{dot}edu